Then, at noon, Gift's mother, Esther, called him in for the day's first meal—a local dish called sima, made of cornmeal and water. Gift sat on the dirt floor of the home he shared with his parents and two brothers—a 10-ft.-by-10-ft. hut, with a thatched roof and not a stick of furniture. And that was when he started feeling sick again. "Pick me up, Mommy," he asked. Setting down Patrick, her 4-month-old, Esther took Gift in her arms. He was feverish. The aches had returned and his jaw grew so tense it locked into place. Frantic, Esther called for her husband, Patris, 28, who was working in the cornfields that provide the family's food and income, which averages less than $100 a year. Carrying Gift on his back, Patris ran to the health clinic two miles away. There the lone staffer, not a doctor but a medical assistant, made an immediate and grim diagnosis: acute malaria, which in combination with the severe anemia Gift was suffering from can lead to organ failure, coma or even death.
Entering its seventh year of famine, Gwengwere, the home of 5,000 people in central Malawi, has been plagued by years of almost unimaginable deprivation. But the people of Gwengwere have some reason for hope: It is one of dozens of "Millennium Villages" throughout Africa, at the center of a bold experiment conceived by economist and global antipoverty crusader Jeffrey Sachs and supported by celebrities like Angelina Jolie to give the world's poorest people the tools—such as access to medicine and clean drinking water—to fend for themselves (see box). Just weeks earlier, with a celebration attended by hundreds of villagers, seeds and fertilizer for every family had arrived. But the fruits of these labors are months if not years away, and Gift didn't have that long.
Patris had to get his son to the hospital instantly, but the nearest one was 19 miles away, and there was only one ambulance in the entire 100-sq.-mile district. Patris managed to hitch a ride with a group of U.N. aid workers—a stroke of fortune that, most anywhere in the developed world, would have sent Gift well on the way to recovery. But here the boy still faced overwhelming odds. The most successful cure for malaria is ACTs, short for Artemisinin Combination Therapies. The good news is that this drug cocktail costs a mere $1.20 per patient; the tragedy is that it is not available to the vast majority of people in Malawi who need it. According to Sachs, the government is too poor to pay for the bulk order required by pharmaceutical companies. "Right now is the worst time for malaria, because it's hot and it's the rainy season," says Michael Keating, the U.N. representative for Malawi. "The combination of malaria and hunger is deadly."
Stretched out in back of the speeding SUV, Gift was slipping fast. "He stopped talking," his father says. "I called 'Gift, Gift,'"—the name Patris gave him because he believes every child is a gift from God. "He wouldn't answer. He was just crying." Then he went into convulsions. It was 3:30 p.m. when they finally made it to the hospital, but even then it took 15 minutes until a nurse, the only pediatric health care worker on staff, could see Gift. Now the little boy was frothing at the mouth, eyes rolling back in his head. The nurse gave him a shot of quinine, long the standard malaria treatment, but it was virtually useless against Gift's advanced case. Still, quinine was all she had—that and some phenobarbital for the convulsions.
Patris held his hand as Gift lay in a simple bed in a bare room hooked to an IV, and later talked about how his middle child was known around the village for his puckish humor. "He liked to go up to adults and say, 'You can't fight me, I'm very brave,'" Patris recalls. Now his son was fighting for his life, and for a time it seemed he just might win. When Esther arrived at 6 p.m.—a villager had taken her on his bike to the highway, where she caught a bus—the convulsions had finally stopped. "We thought maybe he was getting better," Patris says. For 30 minutes, the boy lay peacefully. "He never talked. We didn't know it was the end."
By 6:30 p.m., Gift Msunzi, the very brave, was dead. The next afternoon that single district ambulance became available, and his parents brought him back to Gwengwere, the village air palpably heavy with grief, as neighbors wept for the lost boy. In Malawi the average life expectancy is only 39 and the infant mortality rate one in nine, but no one could believe the impish Gift was gone forever. "He was a funny boy—he just liked to play," laments Likiana Chimchere, 32, mother of Gift's pal James and a family friend. For her this death opens an old wound: In 1997 she too lost a son to malaria. "He got sick one day, and the same day he died," she says softly. "Just like Gift."
Some women washed Gift's body and laid him in his hut, covered in brilliantly colored cloths called kangas. All through the night a female chorus sang hymns over the boy, their haunting tones floating through the village. Relatives crammed the Msunzis' tiny home, and at times Esther broke down, taking refuge next door. Neighbors contributed any food, money or other goods they could spare.
On Jan. 17, just two days after Gift Msunzi kicked a makeshift ball through the village mud, Gwengwere prepared for his funeral. At around 1 p.m. the lanky village leader announced the time for final goodbyes. Gift's parents and close relatives touched the boy one last time. Two men arrived with a small wooden casket with a white cloth attached to it, and laid Gift inside. Then, according to custom, they tucked around him all his earthly belongings—two changes of clothing. Among the last group of mourners a number of children filed in, uncharacteristically mute, one of them Gift's buddy James, squeezing his mother's hand.
"Who will play with my son now?" Chimchere cried. "He was his only friend." Gift's brother Dixon, 7, fell to his knees in sobs, then flung himself against a wall, wailing uncontrollably. The 30-minute service took place in a nearby field. A Christian preacher read scripture and spoke fervently about "the river of death." Mourners trudged to the burial ground on a muddy, winding path through the corn. Amid reverent silence, several men lowered Gift into the earth, then took up hoes to fill the grave.
The Msunzis had but one more day to grieve, then Patris headed back to the fields. By summer, if the promises of the Millennium Villages are fulfilled, Gwengwere should have enough bed nets to ward off lethal mosquitoes; within a year, a rudimentary medical clinic stocked with ACTs. For Patris that hope is bittersweet. He'll never pass that clinic without seeing his boy's face or hearing his laugh. "I will always remember my son for his humor," he says, "and because I loved him so much."
For more information about the Millennium project, visit www.millenniumpromise.org. To see more of PEOPLE's report on Malawi, visit www.people.com/malawi.
- Contributors:
- Mary Green/Malawi.
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