Six months had passed since we'd come to Brazil, and our visas were running out.
I decided to take the kids for a trip to the cataracts of Iguacu, where Brazil, Paraguay and Argentine meet, so I'd have a new entry stamp in the passport.		    
         
   
   
   
proudly presenting: Ahmed, my "casulo"
   
         
    1500 km by bus to go and another 1500 km to return didn't sound too good. I hate riding on buses, it makes me feel sick.Yet never before did it get as bad as on this trip, I just puked all the way to Iguacu and back.    
         
    I wasn't overly impressed by the cataracts, maybe we'd picked the wrong spot to view them, or I just had expected something more spectacular. We crossed the border to Paraguay and spent a day there walking about and doing a bit of shopping in a place selling Chinese and Japanese trinkets. On the following day we reentered Brazil with a new stamp in my passport good for another six months stay.    
    In the town of Iguacu we found fresh strawberries and bought a few cartons to take back to Trancoso. I hadn't thought of the heat in the bus though, the berries were all rotten by the time we got home.    
         
    It was on the way back from Iguacu that it dawned on me I might be pregnant. Sure enough, six months later the kids had a sweet little brother.    
         
    My friend Dora was pregnant as well at the same time, and as both of us had needed Cesarean sections with our previous two kids, we arranged to have the babies in a nice small private hospital in Salvador, the capital of Bahia. Dora's family, consisting of her mother and two sisters, lived in a small town nearby, so we spent the last two weeks of our pregnancies at their place. Than X., my (now) ex-husband, whom I hate to mention but sometimes I just don't see a way around, came up north as well, and, as it was about time for the baby to be born, we moved on to a small hotel in Salvador.    
    One night we'd been to the cinema to see "Dune", and on returning to our hotel room found that all our documents and the money for the hospital were missing. Being confronted with the bad news the innkeeper admitted to having seen a previous customer of his, a Swiss national who'd some time ago stood in the same room that we now occupied, entering the place and leaving again after a short while. It turned out we even had seen the thief, a ratty looking pony-tailed individual, coming down the stairs when we returned from the cinema. He must have used a previously made copy of the room's key to enter and get our stuff. There was nothing to be done, and we went to sleep.    
    An hour or two later the onset of my labor pains woke me up and it was time to go to the clinic.    
         
   
   
   
brothers
    
         
    As I had feared, there was no avoiding having yet another Cesarean, my third one. I was the only patient at the clinic, and the operation was performed by a merry crew to the tunes of Brazilian sounds from the radio. I was delivered of a healthy boy weighing a full five kilos.    
    The only unpleasant moment ensued when, after more than an hour of being operated on, I asked my husband if they weren't done yet and he answered: No, your womb is still outside. Imagining a part of my body lying on the table besides me like an empty hot water bottle nearly made me faint, and I had to ask a nurse to quickly turn up my oxygen supply.    
         
    Soon after the operation I was told to get up and walk, and I only had to stay another two days at the clinic. Just when we were leaving, Dora and her husband checked in. They were desperately trying to contact the doctor, who'd gone to some beach with his girlfriend and had his pager turned off. Dora's baby, a daughter named Estrela, was born three days after mine, the same way.    
    In the following months, Dora and me would joke a lot about Estrela and Ahmed being predestined to become sweethearts, as they were born from two mothers that were good friends, with only three days in between in the same place, probably even in the same bed, considering the size of the clinic.    
         
    Meanwhile we had returned to the hotel with the baby, planning to stay another few days before going back to Trancoso. Well, we didn't even stay a day, at least not me and my yet nameless baby.    
    Back at the hotel I asked X. to get me some medication the doctor had prescribed and some fruit. First he outright refused, and when he finally did go he only returned a couple of hours later, completely drunk, and started to pelt me and the baby with the stuff he'd bought. Then he crashed on the bed and started to snore.    
    I packed a bag, grabbed the baby and took a taxi to the bus station. There was a night bus just about ready to leave for the 600 km journey to Porto Seguro, where we arrived early next morning. The only problem during the trip was that I couldn't go to the loo when the bus stopped without asking some complete stranger to hold my newborn for a few minutes.    
    In Porto, while climbing through a few tied boats to reach the ferry that was to bring us to the other side of the bay, I looked at the little boy in my arms and knew what to call him: Ahmed. This was to be the first of his names, the most important one, the one everybody was gonna call him by.    
    Both of my boys have seven names. In Ahmed's case we had to get a special form to register him, there wasn't enough space on the common one.    
   

   
   
   
   
three friends
    
         
    As I was busy all day long attending to the construction work and, as soon as our house was halfway ready and the restaurant opened, cooking for the guests, Fatima started to look after Ahmed from his third week on. In Nepal, kids carry their smaller siblings tied to their backs when they go out to play. I thought it would be convenient for Fatima to carry Ahmed that way as well. What I hadn't thought of though was the difference in weight between an average lightweight Nepali baby and Ahmed's proud five kilos. We tried fitting him on Fatima's back, but the weight pulled her backwards, so she had to carry him on her arm. Ahmed was out with her and her friends most of the day, had fun, got pampered and was never alone.    
    Even if he accidentally got dropped by one of the kids once in a while, the harm done was insignificant compared with how bad it would have been for him to spend his first year shut out of community life. Ahmed was a tough baby anyway, all my kids were.    
   
Once Ahmed fell from a bed unto the hard concrete floor in his sleep. He didn't even bother to wake up.
   
         
         
   
   
   
mother's little helper
    
         
    When my youngest was one year old, he started to walk. From then on, we always had to keep an eye on him 'cause he loved to get away from our property and explore the village. With his blond hair he was easily recognized, and usually whoever saw and knew him picked him up to bring him back home.    
    Except the day my neighbor Zilda saw a woman trying to enter the bus carrying little Ahmed. As Zilda told us, on being questioned about what she thought she was doing, the woman said she'd thought the cute little critter belonged to nobody, as he didn't wear any clothes. Ahmed usually went naked because it's warm enough for it in Trancoso, and of course he never was too clean, despite getting an average of three showers a day.    
         
    He even made it all the way down to the river once, all alone. At times he disappeared and we just couldn't find him, and got anxious about him having fallen into our pond, which was quite deep in the middle.    
    One afternoon after we had been looking for him in vain for several hours we finally found him asleep in a dark nook beneath the kitchen tables, behind a crate of vegetables. On another day when he'd been missing we found him sleeping hidden beneath a heap of freshly washed clothes.    
         
   
   
   
join me, anyone?
    
         
    Ahmed's favorite adult was Donato, our mason, whom he loved to follow around all day long. In the evenings after work, Donato would take his cachorrinho branco, his "white puppy", to the mirante, the vantage point near the church, to sit and look out to the sea. Or they went to one of the bars on the quadrado.    
    On Sundays our workers and kitchen helpers usually came over for breakfast. I used to bake some fine bread called a "Zopf" (tresse) in German. The dough, prepared with butter and milk, gets divided into four parts and braided. After breakfast, usually one of the workers would take Ahmed down to the beach. The toddler loved the water, and couldn't get enough of running in and out of it.