The little girl smiling at us is Courage, she is Colbert's last living younger sibling. Before I left Cameroon she came and stayed with me along with Colbert and Catherine (I wrote about them previously) and we tested both of these children for HIV and held our breaths. As you now know, Catherine has already lost two of her youngest to AIDS and wanted to know if her other children were infected. Although both children are severely malnourished and hence small and fragile in many ways...they do NOT have HIV. We found this out on the day of my "send off" party, put on for me by more people than I could count from all of the villages I had worked in.10 year old Courage will coninue to live up to the meaning of her name. On that day Catherine and I cried together-we held one another and quietly thanked God and Fate for sparing these two on this day...and we hoped for their years to come.
