Yanomami mothers fight for the right to bury their children during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil (7-24-20)
Yanomami mothers fight for the right to bury their children during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil
Emily Costa and Kátia Brasil
7-24-20
Amazônia Real’s report located indigenous children buried without their families’ knowledge.
On July 1, a mother of Yanomami ethnicity, and member of the Sanöma subgroup, received her daughter’s body in Onkopiu village, in Brazil, after a two-month wait. The baby died of hydranencephaly and septicaemia in a state hospital at Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima state. According to the state’s Medical Legal Institute, the body was kept all this time in a cold storage facility.
The reason for the delay, according to a document by Brazil’s Indigenous Health Secretariat (Sesai), to which Amazônia Real had access, was that the mother had contracted COVID-19 and been hospitalized. The mother recovered from the illness. The child, though, was not infected, which would make the transfer to the village for the funeral ritual safe.
Read the full article: https://globalvoices.org/2020/07/24/yanomami-mothers-fight-for-the-right-to-bury-their-children-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-in-brazil/