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That day, he died.
He had had a sickness that scared people. They called it ‘AIDS.’ No neighbors helped us bury him.
In our sadness, we worked very hard so we could eat and I could go to school. My mother worked constantly, being both mother and father. At first I thought her tiredness and weight loss was because she was working so much. I did not want to think she too could have this terrible disease.
Then, the little sicknesses started. As the months went by, she spent more and more time in bed. I left school to care for her and the children.
I held her head and spooned water into her mouth. “If only my mother were still alive,” she whispered.
I knew what she was thinking: she wanted my grandmother to take care of us. In our country, aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins lived near and helped each other. Because of our great poverty and sicknesses, we now had a small family. I looked at my mother in her suffering and knew it would soon be a smaller family.
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