Summary
MOZAMBIQUE, Africa -- The father takes a Fanta bottle in his hand and whacks it against a rock. CRACK. With the broken glass, he carves a name onto a roughly constructed wooden cross: "Cesilia." Nearby, the mother, draped limp and unmoving over a child-sized wooden casket, doesn't make a sound. A wiry black woman, body hardened by a life of hauling water and working in the fields of rural Mozambique, her eyes are blank, as lifeless as the five-year- old girl she is burying.
The funeral doesn't take long. Friends gather around as the men of the family take turns digging the grave. They sing as the casket is lowered into the ground along with the child's few belongings -- a bundle of frayed clothing, a few handmade toys. The melody is heavy with the tears they don't shed.See the full content of this document
Extract
Seeds of Hope
When they've patted down the dirt and erected the homemade monument, two friends lift the mother, wailing now, from the ground. She claws at them, kicking as they drag her from the grave site. The father stays by his baby girl a minute more before turning to nearby grave and listlessly tracing his finger over another hand-made cross, remembering. Another daughter. Buried just a few months after birth. His friends offer to walk with him, but he waves them away. He makes his way back to his village alone with his thoughts. The sky is as gray as his mood.
Far from homeThere was a time when Cindy Packard lived her picturesque life in Gilbert, Ariz., the wife of a well-to-do physical therapist, blissfully unaware of such pain. Statistics about disease and dying babies in Mozambique had little bearing on her daily dealings as a part-time midwife raising six children in a powder blue, clapboard house straight out of the iconic televis...See the full content of this document
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