14 July 2020
Dearest Fazal,
Good morning. The Tempest Clan has a new family member! June Birdie Kimball was born yesterday afternoon to Sara Teewinot Tempest and Scott Miller Kimball. She weighs 7 pounds 8 ounces. Her brother and sister Owen and Lettie are thrilled. Her great grandfather John Henry Tempest, III is elated. “There are now six boys and two girls to carry on the family name in this fourth generation,” he said to me on the phone. I am sorry my brother Steve is not here to know these adorable children.
As Brooke and I went outside to say prayers of gratitude, a pink aura appeared above Adobe Mesa, shimmering like a heatwave as an alpenglow seized the La Sal Range after a long rainstorm had broken the desert’s fever of 104. We stood quietly watching the last light of day extend itself across the valley—when suddenly, a pink rainbow appeared arching over Round Mountain as if this was the celestial path that brought June Birdie Kimball to Earth. What indominable spirits these babies must be to choose to be born during a global pandemic.
Life and death—there is never one without the other.
This morning saw the first federal execution in seventeen years. The United States of America sanctioned the killing of a prisoner on death row. It was reported by CNN which I heard on the radio: “Daniel Lewis Lee, a convicted murderer, was executed Tuesday morning…after the Supreme Court issued an overnight ruling that it could proceed. Lee was pronounced dead by the coroner at 8:07 a.m. E.T. in Terre Haute, Indiana. His last words were “I didn’t do it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life but I’m not a murderer. You’re killing an innocent man.” Attorney General William Barr said Lee “finally faced the justice he deserved.”
“Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, reiterated in one dissent something he has said before: he thinks it’s time for the court to revisit the constitutionality of the death penalty.”
“Earlene Peterson—whose daughter, granddaughter and son-in-law were tortured, killed and dumped in a lake by Lee and an accomplice—has opposed Lee’s execution, telling CNN last year that she did not want it done in her name.”
And Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Ginsburg, wrote separately to criticize the court’s “accelerated decision-making.” Sotomayor went on to say, “The court forever deprives respondents of their ability to press a constitutional challenge to their lethal injections.”
In 2019, Barr moved to reinstate the federal death penalty after a nearly two-decade lapse.
Meanwhile, Covid-19 continues to spike in thirty-nine states with Miami–Dade reporting a hundred per cent of their ICU units are now full. Florida has had over 10,000 new cases of the virus in recent days and Disney World is reopening today. This “president” continues to say we are doing great.
We are not great, Fazal, we are entitled Americans who see ourselves as the exceptions and exceptional. No one will tell us what to do. No one will tell us we have to wear masks or stop going to bars or churches or movies or whatever impulse we choose to act on. We are exempt, apparently, even from viruses, save the 135,000 fellow citizens who have died or the three million of us who have tested positive! Schools are set to open next month at the urging of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who says only 0.2 per cent of the children will die, never mentioning that the data translates to 14,000 children dead of Covid-19 when the schools open.
This may sound like a rant, but it is simply another day on the coronacoaster.
I stare at the three women you photographed in Malawi in 1994, Sarah, Maria, and Shika, the wives of Kulaso Whisky. Are they alive or dead twenty-six years later? What would their faces reflect now?
Headlines on May 19, 1994 in the New York Times read: “Dictator Said To Be Trailing In Malawi’s First Open Elections.” I read quickly through the article, “Early returns showed Africa’s longest-ruling dictator trailing his opponents today in Malawi’s first multiparty election, officials monitoring the returns said.
“President H. Kamuzu Banda, who has ruled since independence from Britain in 1964, was far behind a former political ally, Bakili Muluzi, and slightly behind Chakufwa Chihana, a labor leader and former political prisoner, officials at the government-run broadcast authority said.”
Banda lost.
Would these women have cared? What were their concerns? You tell me they are refugees from Mozambique. How do politics affect their lives? If they are in this camp in Nyamithuthu, Malawi, because of war, they are in this camp because of politics, dictators, and power.
I suspect these “sister-wives” as we call them in Utah, know about plagues, pandemics, and contagions that kill like cholera. I found in Epidemiology & Infection, June, 1997, that in 1990 between August and December:
an epidemic of cholera affected Mozambican refugees in Malawi causing 1931 cases (attack rate = 2.4%); 86% of patients had arrived in Malawi < 3 months before illness onset. There were 68 deaths (case-fatality rate = 3.5%); most deaths (63%) occurred within 24 h of hospital admission which may have indicated delayed presentation to health facilities and in adequate early rehydration. Mortality was higher in children < 4 years old and febrile deaths may have been associated with prolonged i.v. use. Significant risk factors for illness (P < 0.05) in two case-control studies included drinking river water (odds ratio [OR] = 3.0); placing hands into stored household drinking water (OR = 6.0); and among those without adequate firewood to reheat food, eating leftover cooked peas (OR = 8.0).
These statistics from “Epidemic cholera among refugees in Malawi, Africa: treatment and transmission,” authors, D. L. Swerdlow, G. Malenga, G. Begkoyian, D. Nyangulu, M. Toole, R. J. Waldman, D. N. Puhr, R. V. Tauxe.
Did these three women suffer the deaths of their children? Did they lose family members? How long have they been in Malawi? How long will they stay? The uncertainty of mobile people becomes the constant like death and disease. In America, denial is our certainty. Complacency follows. Arrogance and ignorance are bringing us to our knees as the coronavirus cases keep rising, with Death walking into the rooms where people lie unable to breathe.
These three women are seated on a bench, shoulders touching. I am drawn to their hands brought together on their laps, fingers cradled in the other, thumbs touching, one woman hides her right hand behind her elbow, her left arm outstretched, her hand resting on her knee; all their feet are placed on the mat, ready to stand. Their eyes are steady, looking forward like their feet. Their clothes are pleasant, patterned with stripes, polka-dots, and squares. Two of the women wear hats.
Physical distancing is soul-separating. I miss the people I love. If we are together, we are masked. If we care about each other, we stay away. Self-quarantine is an act of love. But I love being together. I long to sit on a bench with my sister-friends, Alexandra, Ida, and Janet. All of us so very different. Country, race, class. What brings us together are our shared experiences through our children, our concerns, our histories.
A Sense of Common Ground, your words, not mine. This is what I want to know: What constitutes common ground? A place, a people, a purpose? The air we breathe, the water we drink, a shared sky with clouds and stars and the blazing comets that shine before us like dreams? Or maybe it is a livable future reserved for our children, the generations who will follow us like the girl standing in the background against the wall watching.
Common ground is what I miss in our home country, Fazal, a sense of a shared vision of decency and dignity and equity for all with a commitment toward planetary health beginning in our own communities. I wish we could hold each other tight, a simple and necessary embrace to acknowledge what we are losing, missing, yearning for in our bones.
I am lingering on the page because I am lingering with these women, Sarah, Maria, and Shika. I am a voyeur across the continents looking at them with a longing to know who they are and if they were able to return to Mozambique. They do not see me. But they see you and you are seeing them through the lens of your camera. They trusted you to bring them home to a world and a community who cares for more than their own comforts.
Thank you, Fazal.
Bless you and Alex and all the ways
you take care of those
you love,
Terry