Baby born in tree during floods is now Mozambique’s modest celebrity
chibuto (Mozambique) — Rosita Mabuiango’s birth in a tree above swirling waters 17 years ago thrust her into instant stardom, drawing global attention to the worst floods to hit Mozambique in recent memory.
The images of Rosita draped in dirty linen, moments after she and her mother were hoisted to safety by a helicopter, touched the world, helping raise funds for tens of thousands of flood victims. But these days, the teenager doesn’t consider herself special. “I’m normal, it’s just a different way of being born,” she says with a broad smile.
Rosita was born on March 1, 2000, four days after her marooned mother clambered into a tree to escape deadly floods ripping through southern Mozambique. “I
Our survival was a miracle for sure. yes it changed my life, because now I have a house, I also have a job Carolina Chirindza, Rosita Mabuiango’s mother
think it’s God who chose that I be born that way,” the soft-spoken Rosita told, her gaze lowered as she sat on a cream sofa at her godmother’s house in the capital, Maputo. Torrential floods had forced a heavily pregnant Carolina Chirindza and other family members into a tree with no food or water.
Clinging onto tree branches, Chirindza — previously named in the media as Sofia Pedro — also went into labour.
Her mother-in-law held a capulana — a long sarong — under her to catch the baby and prevent it from falling into the muddy, crocodileinfested flood waters. The baby was named Rosita, after Chirindza’s mother-in-law.
“I was not prepared for this, but that’s what God wanted,” Chirindza, 39, told while sitting outside her house in Chibuto, a city 280 kilometres northeast of Maputo.
An AFP journalist witnessed her and the newly-born baby being winched away by a South African defence forces helicopter just after the birth. After landing on dry ground, the exhausted mother cuddled her daughter in drenched linen. As Rosita approaches her 17th birthday, her mother said their survival was a “miracle for sure”. “Yes it changed my life, because now I have a house, I also have a job,” said Chirindza, speaking in front of a three-bedroom house donated to the family by the local municipality.
She was also given a post as cleaner by the district administrator, lifting her out of dire poverty.
Four and a half months after she was born, Rosita and her mother travelled to Washington to lobby the US Congress for expanded aid to help tens of thousands of Mozambicans affected by the catastrophe.
Rosita’s tree-top birth helped cast the spotlight on an impoverished country overwhelmed by floods. Nearly 800 people died in the disaster. —