Love in the Driest Season Read Online Free PDF Page B

with three dimes a day per child. Flies settled on the children, food, and dishes. The in-house clinic had shut down for lack of medicine. Diapers were old washcloths folded into triangles. Food was cornmeal mush and a lumpy porridge. Most of the fifteen to twenty infants in the ward at any one time had chronic diarrhea. Because many of the workers had little training in hygiene or lacked the proper sanitary materials, diapers were not properly disinfected before being put on another infant, allowing bacteria and disease to slink from child to child.
    In January 1998, a newborn named Memory Chinyanga was sent from the orphanage to the hospital. She had not been well, though the workers at the orphanage could not list any specific illness. She died a few days later. The listed cause of death was dehydration. As was the standard procedure, no one at the orphanage saw her again. Her corpse would have been taken to the city’s overburdened morgue, eventually wrapped in a white sheet, and put in a wooden coffin. A truck would have taken her to a potter’s field on the outside of town. Her corpse would have been lowered into the red dirt soil. Prison inmates would shovel soil on top of her coffin until she lay under a rounded lump of earth.
    A few days after Memory died, an infant a few cribs over was also sent to the hospital. Her name was Tatenda Jeselant (her first name means “we give thanks”). She had chronic diarrhea and was vomiting all day. She died two days later.
    The next week, the workers called for a van to rush young Godfrey Muparutsa, not yet two years old, to the hospital. He never came back. The doctors said he died of pneumonia, a rather elastic term used to connote any inflammation of the lungs or to note they had become filled with fluid. Was its origin a virus? Bacterium? No one could say. There were no autopsies performed. There were no inquiries as to how three children in a state-run orphanage died in four weeks. There were no newspaper headlines, no staff shake-ups, and no change in procedure, for AIDS had rendered this scenario routine.
    The calendar turned to February, and an infant named Shingirai Nyamayaro was brought in by social welfare officers. She had been abandoned, origins unknown. She developed diarrhea, which, because the orphanage could not afford rehydration packets or antidiarrhea medications, could not be stopped. She became dehydrated and died after a very short stay in the hospital. Then Munashe Tsekete fell ill. His breathing was raspy. He coughed a lot. They took him to the hospital, where he stopped breathing altogether. Five Chinyaradzo infants or toddlers were dead in eight weeks. Munashe’s official cause of death was listed as “difficulties in breathing.”
    Joe Bhebbe, another infant, went a few weeks later too.
    A month passed, and so did the short lives of Frasia Chateuka, who died of pneumonia, and Ashley Mhlanga, who “could not breathe.”
    Early one evening in the dry season of 1998, several weeks before we first encountered the orphanage, a van arrived. Darkness was falling as the social welfare officer walked in, calling for Mesikano. He was holding the infant Constance had found. The clinic in the rural area had no place to keep her, he explained, so the police officers had driven her into Harare. The girl-child was squalling to high heaven.
    “She still had blood on her, they hadn’t cleaned her up,” Mesikano would later remember. “She had a clip on her umbilical cord, a stump. But she looked healthy. She had nice black hair, very full. She was actually sort of pink and plump.”
    She and a couple of the other women set to work cleaning the child. They soaked her in a small tub of soap and warm water, washing off the blood and dirt. They put antibiotic cream on the ear wounds. She had a small, fleshy stump on the outer edge of her left hand, a sixth finger. They looped a thread around it, pulled in opposite directions, and popped it off. They put cream over