Basket Baby by Kelli M. Donley

Author:Kelli M. Donley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: bolivia, arizona, flagstaff, loss and hope
Publisher: Kelli M. Donley

18

Luz cradled her wawa on her chest, as she’d done the weeks prior to arriving in Tarija. Carefully, she moved around the kitchen with the broom, sweeping and rocking. She was more concerned with the movement than her productivity. If she swayed just so, her daughter would stop fussing and fall back to sleep. Plus, Ruth’s meticulous housekeeping rarely left a crumb out of place in the tidy kitchen. Dinner simmered from a half dozen pots and pans on the old stove.

Luz couldn’t bear to hear her daughter’s raspy, gurgling cry. The noise whistled through sutures closing the infant’s upper lip. The taught stitches also ran along one side of the baby’s right nostril. Anyone near the child could hear her discomfort with the wheezing of each breath. It wasn’t just the after effects of surgery, for which her wawa was receiving regular doses of pain medication, but the arm restraints that kept her from touching the wounds.

The baby still flailed, days later, with an optimism only seen in children – ever hopeful one of her arms would come free.

For Luz, watching this constant struggling was worse than any pain she ever experienced. Worse than the time she was kicked in the face by a llama, which she had foolishly startled. Worse than when her cousin mischievously struck the side of her hive, leaving Luz with welts and fat fingers for days, having retrieved one angry bee at a time from her long braids. Listening to her daughter in agony was even worse than the blinding pain she’d endured months earlier, when giving birth on her mother’s dusty kitchen floor.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Luz jumped, startled from her daydream, by the heavy iron knocker striking the front door. Her daughter whimpered from the tussle. Luz heard Ruth greeting visitors, inviting them into the house.

“Luz, come please. Bring the baby!” Ruth commanded from the front room.

With hesitation, she made her way from the kitchen to find the group.

Who could be waiting for her?

A pair stood as she entered the room. Ruth introduced them quickly before motioning for Luz to unwrap the baby from her chest, and hand her to the woman, a physician. The man, introduced as a local priest, nodded, watching the child intently. Luz saw a kind smile in his eyes at first sight of her baby.

“The wounds look clean, and there are no signs of infection. It seems you’ve found the right nanny for the child.” Doctora Claudia held her wawa under the light of the dining room table, carefully examining the sutures. “It isn’t easy to care for a baby in pain. Is she eating well?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Luz looked at her feet.

Women could be doctors? The only women to ever come to her village clinic arrived with bags of immunizations and pamphlets about nutrition and maternal health. The health promotoras were mocked loudly; few villagers were capable of reading the handouts, much less willing to take birth control advice from city women.

“You know you aren’t to breast feed her,” the doctor raised an eyebrow.

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