Barlie

On Ollet Island, a 10-month-old girl named Barlie Mule was brought into the Canvasback medical clinic by her father and mother to see Dr. Frank Crider. The emaciated baby had sores on her face and her puffy eyes were glazed and listless.

Her ailments were many: poor weight gain, cough, dehydration, pneumonia in one lung, skin lesions, eye and ear drainage. Her father seemed extremely tense. He wanted his other four children to be seen too. It seems they'd buried the child's older sister just the day before. The three-year-old girl had weighed only 13 pounds when she died.

Dr. Crider asked the father if he knew his older daughter had been very sick. "Yes," he said, "but what could we do?"

Dr. Crider put the baby on antibiotics, gave her vitamin drops, ear and lesion medication and a recipe for rehydration salts to be made with ingredients her folks had at home. He recommended that both mother and child go to the hospital in Majuro to have their lungs x-rayed.

In the Marshall Islands, when a baby turns one year old, the family throws a celebration for the whole community at which time they name the child. The reason people don't name their babies until this time is because so many don't live to see their first birthday.

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