They gave her some of their herbs. They’re always digging up roots and stripping bark off trees, but nothing like that can deal with a lebolobolo bite, which is what this must have been. According to the daughter, her mother died before the baby even woke up. Of course, they don’t lose any time and they prepared to bury the mother that morning. But, as you might or might not know, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, when a Mosarwa woman dies and she’s still feeding a baby, they bury the baby too. There just isn’t the food to support a baby without a mother. That’s the way it is.

The girl hid in the bush and watched them take her mother and her baby brother. It was sandy there, and all they could manage was a shallow grave, in which they laid her mother, while the other women wailed and the men sang something. The girl watched as they put her tiny brother in the grave too, wrapped in an animal skin. Then they pushed the sand over them both and went back to the camp.

The moment they had gone, the child crept out and scrabbled quickly at the sand. It did not take her long, and soon she had her brother in her arms. There was sand in the child’s nostrils, but he was still breathing. She turned on her heels and ran through the bush in the direction of the road, which she knew was not too far away. A truck came past a short time later, a Government truck from the Roads Department. The driver slowed, and then stopped. He must have been astonished to see a young Mosarwa child standing there with a baby in her arms. Of course he could hardly leave her, even though he could not make out what she was trying to tell him. He was going back to Francistown and he dropped her off at the Nyangabwe Hospital, handing her over to an orderly at the gate.

They looked at the baby, who was thin, and suffering badly from a fungal disease. The girl herself had tuberculosis, which is not at all unusual, and so they took her in and kept her in a TB ward for a couple of months while they gave her drugs. The baby stayed in the maternity nursery until the girl was better. Then, they let them go. Beds on the TB ward were needed for other sick people and it was not the hospital’s job to look after a Mosarwa girl with a baby. I suppose they thought that she would go back to her people, which they usually do.

One of the sisters at the hospital was concerned. She saw the girl sitting at the hospital gate and she decided that she had nowhere to go. So she took her home and let her stay in her backyard, in a lean-to shack that they had used for storage but which could be cleared out to provide a room of sorts. This nurse and her husband fed the children, but they couldn’t take them into the family properly, as they had two children of their own and they did not have a great deal of money.