A Girl Named Disaster

Content Warning: The source text deals with complex themes, including child marriage, domestic violence, emotional abuse, brief suicidal ideation, and cultural displacement.

Eleven-year-old Nhamo lives in a village in Mozambique with her late mother’s family. Her aunt Chipo calls her back to the house to finish her chores while she’s foraging for fruit one day. Nhamo is reluctant to return. She stays in the bushes, studies her family’s footprints on the path, and thinks about her life in the village.

Nhamo returns to the communal storehouse and finds her cousin Masvita making a clay pot. Aunt Chipo yells for Nhamo again. Finally, Nhamo fetches water, waters and weeds the fields, and returns to the hut where Grandmother is smoking her pipe. Grandmother tells Nhamo a story about the ancient kings that she’s heard many times. Afterward, Nhamo rejoins her family. Aunt Chipo and her younger sister, Aunt Shuvai, compliment Masvita’s clay work.

Nhamo sets out to collect firewood. The task can be frightening because the village is “surrounded by a forest” (6). Nhamo is most afraid of leopards because her mother was killed by a