you just fall asleep in class. When you do fall asleep the teacher yells at you that you are lazy and stupid and embarrasses you in front of the other 40 students. Plus, we ran out of corn last night, so there won’t be any breakfast, so I know I’ll be tired. Hopefully I’ll just grab some fruit from someone’s yard when they aren’t looking.
That always helps.
At the moment that I was just about to punch him and tell him to shut up I saw his face and I could tell something wasn’t right. He looked like he was a zombie or something. His eyes were open but he just
looked into space, and his eyes were so funny looking. He must have been sleeping under the part of the roof that leaks, because his face was all wet. I got up off the dirt floor and ran to Ba Mommy’s room and told her that something was wrong with Joe. When I woke up in the morning, Ba Daddy was putting Joe on his bike.
Stupid Joe, why does he get to ride on Daddy’s bike? I’m the one that goes to school now, not him. He just plays in the dirt and cries all day long. Ba Mommy told me that Ba Daddy was taking Joe to the clinic
because the funny dressed American people told her it was important. What did they know about who should ride a bike? They both had two fancy bikes after all.
After school I saw Ba Daddy waiting for me with his bike. I knew he would let me ride it after all. We didn’t go very far though, we just went to the clinic together down the path. That’s where I saw Joe again. He was lying on a bed with some plastic thing in his arm. I thought we must have been lucky because only people with money get to use beds. That’s when Ba Daddy told me that Joe was really sick. The plastic thing in his arm was putting medicine into his body so that he wouldn’t be so hot the nurse told me. The nurse said we were lucky. That this week alone two other children got really sick and died and went to heaven because of something called malaria. He said Joe would be better though. Lucky for us the nurse was right, Joe did get better. He came back a couple of days later and we were all really happy. We even had a chicken for dinner. Ba Mommy always said we only could have chicken when important people came to visit. I’m not sure who was so important, but I was happy to have my little brother back.
Malaria is a preventable and treatable disease that affects millions of people across the planet. In Zambia, 4 million people are affected annually. Over 50 percent of the malaria deaths are in children five years and younger.
