The Holy Mother Mission roof was a strange, innovative style of farm. Rows of transparent plastic water bottles, filled with the dark lagoon water, lined up neatly, drying in the blistering Harbor City sun. It was the initial harvest of hope in a soil that yielded few other things but hardship.
Within, Reuben, Anna, and Sister Agnes had turned the clinic's main room into a classroom. A chalkboard, rescued from a collapsed schoolhouse, stood against a wall. Drawn on it were crude, bare diagrams: a stick man drinking from a puddle, then a face twisted in a frown and cramps; the same stick man drinking from a bottle with a sun radiating from it, then a smiling face.
They were today's patients' mothers and grandmothers—women with worry and exhaustion etched on their faces, their infants stra
