MY ROOTS

Today, I want to write about my roots. My early years were spent in North-Eastern Brazil, in an area called “Sertão” which literally means “desert.” However, it isn’t desert as we understand it, with nothing but sand and the occasional oasis. The Brazilians have a special name for it, which describes it perfectly – “catinga” but I don’t know an English version of it nor does it appear in my Portuguese/English dictionary. Catinga consists of low lying, sparse vegetation and stunted trees due to lack of rain.

My parents were missionaries. We lived under very primitive conditions – no running water, electricity sometimes and even then only until 10.00 p.m. Even though these were my early years, I have been blessed with a very retentive memory (my earliest recollection was when I just 9 months of age, when I couldn’t even talk and I know it to be true, because my Mum confirmed the event in question).

I was born at home – delivered by a Canadian missionary midwife, which is somewhat prophetic, seeing that I have been a proud Canadian citizen for the past 30 years.

The only source of water available to us, was from a river, some distance from our home. A little boy with a donkey, laden with a huge Ali Baba pots, one on either side, would fetch it for us, and that was our total water supply for a week. Mum used to put a lot of specific little fishes in this water in order to keep it healthy. Every drop of water was precious. To this day, the sound of a dripping tap drives me up the wall!

My sister and I used to be bathed in a “bacia” – a shallow but large circular aluminum container (for want of a better word) and that bath water would be used for watering Mum’s flowers – so was the water used to wash the dishes. Mum had the only flower garden in the entire village.

Infant mortality in that part of Brazil was (and probably still is) extremely high. One child in five would survive to the age of 5. This was due to two factors: poverty and ignorance. Mum did her best to teach young mothers how to care for their children, but it was an uphill struggle, because she was fighting against superstition, ignorance and closed minds, for the most part.

She told me of an occasion when she went to visit a young woman who’d just given birth. When she walked into this woman’s bedroom, it was in pitch darkness. The window had been closed and a heavy black curtain rigged over it so that no daylight could get in.

Mum asked the young mother why she was lying in darkness on a lovely sunny day. “Because if the sun touches me or my baby, we will both die,” she replied. “I have to stay in here with my baby until he’s one months old.”

Mum insisted that the heavy black drapes be pulled off so she could see the mother and her baby. When she picked up the infant, Mum also noticed a peculiar odour emanating from the child.

“What’s this poultice on the baby’s chest?” she inquired.

“The baby was coughing, so my “parteira” (the woman who delivered the baby) told me to put a poultice of … crushed cockroaches on his chest.” What an unutterably horrible, disgusting thought. Needless to say, Mum immediately peeled it off and bathed the child, much to his mother’s horror and acute distressed, who was convinced that Mum was killing her precious child!

This will give you an idea of the kind of blank walls Mum came up against, every time she tried to help young mothers. It will also allow you to understand why infant mortality was so incredibly high.

When a child dies in infancy, seeing that he or she has never sinned, they’re called “Anginhos” – “Little Angels.” It is traditional that Little Angels are buried in little white coffins, and that their pallbearers are children.

In the summer months, there’d be a steady procession of little white coffins coming up the road on their doleful way to the local cemetery. When they reached our house, the children would lay the coffin down on the raw earth, and sit on it to rest themselves, while one of them came to the door to ask Mum for “flowers for the little angel.” Mum would always go into her garden, pick a posy, and give it to the little messenger. He or she would run back, place the posy on the coffin and off they’d go … and so it went, day after day.

One of the women in the village who was childless, always made a big fuss of me. I was a platinum blond little girl, with blue eyes, so in that part of the world where just about everyone was dark skinned (due mostly to sun exposure) and brown eyed, I was something of an anomaly. One day Mum said to her “Ineza, you obviously love children – how come you don’t have any – if you don’t mind my asking?”

Ineza heaved a big sigh. “Yes, I do love children, but my husband and I became discouraged … after we’d lost our first TEN.”

My mind just can’t get around what it must’ve been like to have lost 10 babies, all in infancy.

“Inez, have another one, and I will show you how to care for it, so that it lives.”

Inez went ahead and had another child, and she followed Mum’s directives on hygiene, cleanliness, and child care scrupulously. The other mothers were horrified and told her she was nuts, for doing such things as giving her baby a sun bath in the early morning, before the sun grew hot. They thought she was out of her mind for washing her breasts before nursing her baby and for making sure his pacifier was always kept scrupulously clean. They told her she was killing her baby by bathing it every day. Didn’t she realize she was washing away all her baby’s protection by sloshing water all over him every day and – oh horrors – using SOAP?

But Inez’s baby thrived, and that helped Mum’s cause more than anything else could’ve done. Other young mothers started following her example, and for the duration that we lived in that village, infant mortality did go down.

Brazil is a country that has a growing season of 365 days. It’s incredibly rich in minerals, oil, gold, water and precious stones. So why isn’t it a leading, prosperous nation? The answer is: education, or the lack thereof. Where you have a nation with a huge segment of the population that can neither read nor write, condemning them to living well under the poverty line, where dreadful slums proliferate on mountainsides, where this is no health or vaccination plan to prevent children from dying of communicable diseases like measles, diphtheria, whooping cough etc. you have a country which cannot possibly thrive and become a leading nation. The answer to most of its woes is: lack of education.