Word: nereciana
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...beginning was happening," Joseph says. "We built this house together with our bare hands." In the mornings Nereciana would don her black-and-white igitenge (a sort of floral skirt) and rubber flip-flops and head out with Joseph to work the fields. Nereciana, a talkative woman, loved recounting the tales of Bakame, a mythical rabbit who is always playing tricks on humans and other animals. And for Joseph, hunched over, listening to his wife, it seemed that even though life was hard, "this was, for us, a time of great hope...
...spring, Nereciana walked up the hill to visit an ababyaza (traditional midwife) for a consultation. The woman felt Nereciana's stomach and pelvis, asked her questions about her menstrual cycle and then deduced what the couple had begun to suspect: Nereciana was pregnant...
...Nereciana had been looking forward to this ceremony. It is considered bad luck in Rwanda to think up names for a baby before birth; too many don't make it out of the womb alive. But as Nereciana grew heavy with child and finally could no longer waddle out to work in the fields, she imagined the ceremony, the party, the happy times ahead. Joseph was laying in a supply of banana beer. Ripe pineapples, Nereciana's favorite fruit, were abundant. The birth and the naming ceremony would be, after the camp and the long march back, a new beginning...
...hours after her contractions began, Nereciana was racked by spasms and began complaining of violent abdominal pain. At first Joseph and neighbor Beatrice Nyirahabimana thought the severe contractions of first labor caused her pain. But after eight hours, it was clear that some vital force was leaving Nereciana. Joseph went to seek help. "I'm too weak," Nereciana said to Beatrice. "I'm dying, aren...
...fetus' heart may already have stopped beating when Nereciana died. The cause of her death remains unknown: pre-eclampsia may have brought on seizures, or her uterus may have ruptured. But a larger cause is blisteringly clear: Rwanda is a nation so poor in goods and so weak in spirit that it cannot even give birth to a future. Nereciana's death, a tragedy that still lives in Joseph's sad eyes, was part of the slow genocide of hope, a sin that can be undone only by the miracle of an outside world that cares...