Word: rwanda
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When a baby is born in Rwanda, a traditional ceremony takes place on the eighth day of the child's life. Banana beer is served, and the community gathers as the newborn is brought out and held up to the sky. The infant is scrutinized, and names are suggested by family, friends and neighbors until the father hears one that sounds right...
More than 90% of the deliveries in Rwanda are facilitated by traditional midwives. These women often learn their trade from their mothers, by watching other village women give birth and by giving birth themselves. "I had no formal training," says Modesta, a traditional midwife. "I'm only learning now how to recognize risk factors and to decrease the risk of infection." Their equipment often consists of little more than cloth, an old blade and a string to tie off the umbilical cord. While the Rwandan government hopes eventually to have most women deliver in hospitals, that is wishful thinking...
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...
...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...
This week we turn to East Africa, with Karl Taro Greenfeld's story and James Nachtwey's photographs about mother and child mortality in Rwanda. (Nachtwey last week won an Eisie photography award for his image of a Kosovar refugee that ran in TIME last spring.) The continuing tragedy of that African nation is that it cannot even repopulate itself: 1 out of every 9 mothers dies in childbirth--compared with 1 in 4,000 in the U.S.--and 40% of children die before age five. When we developed this story idea, we wanted to ensure it would be supplemented...