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that, too. Then they looked over her body and facial features in an attempt to guess the new child’s ethnic heritage, a popular orphanage pastime.
    They could rule out that she was Shona, the nation’s largest ethnic group. She lacked the deep black skin and broad facial structure for that. Nor was she a mixture of black and white; she was much too dark to be biracial. Someone looked at her burnt-tan complexion and her deep-set eyes and suggested she was from Mozambique, the country to the east. Then again, someone else said, she looked almost like the Ndebele, the nation’s second largest ethnic group, cousins of the Zulu peoples of South Africa. But that downy hair on the back of her ears—didn’t Indian babies have that? Perhaps, but then there was the puzzle of her small, rather flat nose.
    Mesikano finally laughed and gave up the game.
    “She is a child of Africa,” she said. “That much we know.”
    It was up to her as matron to name the new children. This was a great power, of course, and she did not take it lightly. She wanted something pretty, for the little girl now sleeping peacefully in her arms was a thing of beauty. She finally settled on Chipo, a popular girl’s name in the region. It translates from Shona as “gift.”
    “I wanted her to have a pretty African name, something she would be proud of all her life,” Mesikano would later say, explaining her name selection process. “I wanted something to remind her of how special she is, and the circumstances of how she came to be. She seemed a gift of the land itself.”
    A worker opened the home’s daily medical chart, where they kept a log of each child’s health and condition. She wrote “Chipo” on a line of the ledger, putting a star next to her name. “New admission. 3.1 kilos (6.8 pounds). Brought in by social welfare officers. Wound on ear but the baby looks healthy.”
    The entries in the log read something like a status report of the ward. It showed that Chipo was one of fourteen infants, nine crawlers, and thirty-one toddlers in a three-room ward. Of the fourteen infants, six were in bad shape.
    Caroline Razo was “coughing and crying in the night. She is severely wasted,” the log read. Tinashe, whose last name was not recorded, had diarrhea and was vomiting. “Keep an eye on him,” the nightly report noted. An infant named Gladys had some sort of unknown fluid oozing from her ears. Ester was on antibiotics and Tatenda needed amoxicillin, which, the log noted, they did not have.
    The next day, three infants were rushed to Harare Hospital.
    Caroline was gasping for breath by this point, desperately crying, waving her arms to and fro. Then she stopped gasping and died in the van while they were still in traffic. Tinashe was admitted minutes later, for similar difficulties in breathing. Yemurai had an ugly knot on her right arm.
    For her part, the girl-child named Chipo was placed in the second crib to the right of the entrance. A bright yellow note card was put above her crib, noting her name, her date of birth, and the day she was brought in. Workers scarcely had time to pick her up, though, because the week after Caroline died, Collins Murehwa began vomiting, over and over again, until he was spitting blood and not much else. He was taken to the hospital, where they could do nothing for him. He vomited until he died. Clara Mlambo didn’t last much longer; her tiny body withered and dehydrated until her lungs seemed to collapse and her heart stopped. Sandra Mahohoma didn’t have a chance, coughing and gasping day by day until her strength left her.
    Thirteen infants were dead in six months, the worst mortality rate in Chinyaradzo’s history. There was little Mesikano could do but get used to it. There was no money to train her young staff. Many of them were teenagers or twenty-something girls who had been raised at the home and had nowhere else to go. They were officially known as trainees in a one-year course called