MIAMI — For 3-year-old Amina, it was a day of firsts.
The Iraqi girl had been deaf since birth. With the help of the U.S. Army in Iraq and a Miami-based aid group, she was flown to the United States to have a hearing implant surgically placed in her ear.
On Thursday, the implant was activated for the first time. She heard several doctors clapping and her father's gentle Arabic accent. But the sound she seemed most enamored with was that of her own voice.
"Ah, oh, baba," she said.
She called different objects "baba" — the Arabic word for daddy — because she could not differentiate sounds, her father, Mohammed, said through an interpreter. As he watched Amina's big brown eyes react to the sounds around her, Mohammed repeatedly pointed to himself and said "baba, baba."
"I'm going to try to say the names of all the relatives," he said.
Amina's family is back in Iraq, where Col. Warner Anderson, an Army special forces doctor, first heard of her story.
Anderson, who had been in Iraq in 2003 with the 352nd Civil Affairs Command, and his wife, Ruth Macias de Anderson, a registered nurse, e-mailed Dr. Thomas Balkany. Balkany, chairman of the otolaryngology department at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine, agreed to do the surgery.
The cochlear implant in Amina's ear turns sound into electrical impulses that activate the hearing nerve, allowing the deaf to hear. The surgery was performed two weeks ago at the University of Miami Jackson Memorial Medical Center.
"It's one of those moments in life that are pretty much indescribable, but to see a child open her eyes and hear her dad's voice for the very first time is a wonderful thing," Balkany said.
The surgery was the easy part, he said.
Amina will spend the next month in therapy in Miami and several months in therapy in Iraq to learn to connect sounds to voices and objects. "She has to go through the same process that a newborn would go through," he said.
The International Kids Fund is still trying to raise money for the $40,000 surgery. The group needs to raise about $32,000, which covers the surgery, airfare, the family's stay and therapy.
Mohammed, 30, a painter who did not want his last name used for fear of retribution once he returns home to Baghdad, said he can't wait to introduce his daughter to a world of sounds.
Amina "is very inquisitive," he said.