Millions of Arms

Creative nonfiction
by Melissa Lambert

A tiny girl in a tattered yellow dress knows all the words. She sings them clearly, her eyes looking straight ahead. Her hair is a ponytail of thin braids, tied back with a piece of string. She has no shoes on her dusty feet. I am captivated by the way she doesn't even notice that I am singing along with her. We are singing:
                Moçambique, nossa terra gloriosa
                Pedra a pedra, construindo o novo dia
                Milhões de braços, uma só força
                Ó Patria Amada, vamos vencer!

Just last year, the Mozambican government changed the national anthem to this new song. Children, who sing the song in packed-dirt courtyards at the beginning of each school day, know the words better than most adults do. Even the smallest children, like this one in the yellow dress, intone each word with a kind of smoldering dignity.
                Mozambique, our glorious land
                Stone by stone, constructing a new day
                Millions of arms, just one strength
                O beloved homeland, we will overcome!

Overcoming seems to be a common theme in this courtyard. I am at an orphanage which, for the privacy of the children, has asked not to be identified. I will tell you that it is somewhere in Mozambique, one of the poorest countries in the world, which runs along the southeastern coast of the African continent. These children standing in straight orderly lines, their bare feet fidgeting just a little in the vermilion dirt, are orphans in some sense of the word. It is becoming increasingly difficult to define what an orphan is, but it is certain that they have lost at least one parent, and that there are no family members who are capable for caring for them at this moment. Some of them have lost both parents. Some of them are newly orphaned; others have been alone for years.

It is difficult to express the scope of the orphan challenge in Mozambique and much of the rest of Africa. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, there are 43 million orphans. There is a direct relationship between disease, poverty, and the overabundance of orphaned children. A few of the most prominent diseases in Mozambique are malaria, diarrheal dehydration caused by impure water, and, of course, HIV/AIDS. The HIV/AIDS epidemic, in particular, is busily destroying families and saturating communities with orphans. These diseases, and other factors, combine to make Mozambique one of the most underdeveloped countries in the world, with a prodigious rate of children who have lost one or both parents. Recent figures estimate that approximately 16 percent of all Mozambican children are orphans.

In these conditions, the traditional kinship nets that have so long characterized African societies are ripping and tearing. It is not difficult to find grandmothers caring for eight of their orphaned grandchildren. Orphaned children are taken in by aunts, uncles, cousins, older brothers and sisters. I know one woman who is caring for two children who were left orphaned when her landlord died unexpectedly. Houses are full of parentless children. Communities are overflowing. When there seems to be no place to put a child, or when family members don't have a way of guaranteeing adequate food and medical care to a child who has recently lost a parent, many children find themselves in local orphanages.

In the infants orphanage on the other end of the city, it is lunchtime for the babies. Each infant has just been bathed and dressed in clean clothes. We carry them, two by two, into the tiny dining room, where we place each one in a little chair with a tray attached. Lunch today is something mushy again, something made of milk and soggy bread. I choose the baby who is crying, since most of them are waiting quietly and patiently. Mostly I do this because it seems like a challenge.

The first few spoonfuls, John is content to be eating, but it doesn't take him long to develop some kind of an antagonism toward me, or at least toward the way I spoon baby food. He slaps my hand, spilling milk all over himself and me. Then, as I clean it up, he yells angrily at the delay. So I spoon up a little bit more, and he hits my hand away again.

"OK, John, no more food for you," I say in Portuguese, standing up.

He starts screaming.

I sit back down.

He hits my hand away again.

"John, do you want to eat or not?" I ask him, not really expecting an answer from this 18-month-old child, but fully convinced that he can understand me.

For a moment he is silent, repentant, downcast eyes gazing at his tray. I sit back down, cautiously take a spoonful of mush, and aim it toward his pink mouth. The spoon touches his lips. He lets out a triumphant shout, the force of which propels milk into my face.

And just like that, lunchtime continues.

When John has finally finished eating, and my pants are covered with soggy bread and goo, I move to a tiny, unintimidating baby with eyes that are new planets, large and luminous. He smiles as I approach with the bowl.

I coo and lift the spoon toward his mouth. He opens his mouth wide, leans forward, takes the spoon between his gums, and begins sucking at it furiously. I give in and laugh as a thousand drops of milk splatter across his face and his freshly changed clothes.

I glance over at my husband, Joe. He has white flecks scattered liberally across his black shirt and something pasty smeared across his arms and hands. He looks up at me with a dazed grin.

"They gave me the new baby to feed," he explains. "She doesn't exactly know how to eat with a spoon yet."

I look at the caretaker on the other side of the room. She winks at me.

For the past few months, my husband and I have been volunteering regularly at this infant orphanage, holding, feeding and dressing babies. At the orphanage across the city, we have given a few English classes. One of the main lessons we have learned through these visits is this: Taking care of kids is hard. We have developed a deep respect for the orphanage workers who work long shifts caring for their dozens of children, and earn very little money to take home to their own families. We have also learned this: Babies are babies. They are sweet and tearful and loving and messy and charming and exasperating and honest. They are often loud. And each one is different.

At moments like this, I try to visualize the 43 million orphans scattered across the southern part of this vast continent. Sometimes their arms are hanging down; sometimes they are raised defiantly. What would 43 million orphans look like, all crowded into one place? Where could we possibly fit all of them?

Across the street from the infant orphanage, a long pale beach stretches out like a cat, the Indian Ocean lapping at its fur. The ocean is filled with layers and layers of waves, colliding and breaking and shattering on the coastline. On at least two of these beaches, wrecked ships are hopelessly wedged into the sand. Local stories claim that fifteen years ago, a hurricane arose from the depths of the ocean and hurled these gigantic ships onto their respective coastlines. One of the boats, which landed in a populous area, is now practically destroyed. People have harvested the metal to use or sell; all that remains is a rusty shell split down the middle. The other boat found its way to a more deserted place. It is still intact, covered with moldy green and brown growth, an inexplicable tire dangling from a rope tied to its hull. The massive craft leans precariously to one side, planted, bulky, a great rotten yam.

The families in this region have been attacked, like so many boats floating lonely on the waters; they have disintegrated under powerful outside forces. Sometimes waves rise like monsters out of the sea and we find ourselves grasping at grasshopper legs and pieces of hay, at anything that floats. It is in the grasping that we discover where safety actually lies.

I know the traditional family is out of vogue in many corners, and sometimes the mainstream of society, but the fact is, these orphanages and boats, and every single wave that rises out of the ocean, make me feel desperately, passionately grateful for mine. My husband and I have spent three of the first four months of our marriage here in Africa, watching each other in a wide variety of unexpected situations. He has seen me angry; I have seen him sad. We stay up at night talking about what we want to teach in our own future family. The second time we went to the infant orphanage, I knew I had made a good choice. I was helping dress slippery babies, their skin still glistening with silver bathwater, when he crept away. After a few minutes, I followed him and peeked around the door into the nursery. He was holding one of the smaller, sicker babies against his chest, humming and dancing some kind of a boxstep across the linoleum floor.

At the risk of sounding hopelessly sentimental, I will admit that I thrill to the very center of my bones every time I hear the third line of the Mozambican national anthem's chorus. Milhões de braços, uma só força. I picture 43 million thin, marrow-filled arms rising up in the air. One of those arms curves back into a faded yellow dress with a white collar. Another one is attached to a head with eyes that mirror the lunar cycle. There are millions of hands that I have never seen before—but there are also a few that I have held, which is why I believe every word that these children sing.