One morning about a month ago, I was sitting in my room correcting papers and I heard someone run into the building and knock on the door of the health-room where Sr. Claudina, a new sister in Inharrime and a nurse-practitioner, was working. It was a student from the technical school where I teach, “Sister?,” he called, “Director Maria Graça asked me to call you to come quick to the school – a student just fainted and he’s not responding.” I heard this exchange, but didn’t think too much of it – students often get overheated when they’re working with the big machines in the workshops.

When sister returned for lunch, I asked out of curiosity, “Who was the student that was sick? What do you think was wrong with him?” She replied to me, “They said his name was Dércio, it looks like a pretty bad case of cerebral malaria.” At this I started – could it be Dércio, my student that had participated in the Science Fair? No, I imagined, Dércio had stopped me that morning on my way out of class and asked me to come back in the afternoon and help him with a project. I had just talked to him, and he was excited, animated, not sick at all.

I quickly called Director Maria Graça who had also gone with us to Science Fair and knew Dércio well – yes, it’s him she said. He had fainted during computer class and became completely unresponsive. After Sr. Claudina arrived, they had rushed him to the hospital in the school car and he’d been hooked up to a Quinine IV. Malaria is a cyclical disease – people often have terrible headaches and fevers for a few hours, and then begin to feel better, only to feel worse again later. If our guess was correct – Dércio likely had been feeling these cyclical symptoms for days, but had put off going to the hospital to finish his big final project that was due the next day. Now, the malaria had moved from his blood to his brain.

Later in the afternoon, Maria Graça and I went to visit Dércio at the hospital: He’s already 19 and lives alone in a small house in Inharrime during the school year, so he didn’t have any family in town. When we walked into the crowed triage room where he was being kept, I was immediately taken aback – he lay covered in sweat and convulsing on the white bed. I had never seen someone in the midst of a convulsion – how horrible! His body moving in fits up and down – as if he couldn’t get his breath, but moving the whole body.

Later in the day, we heard from a professor who lived near the hospital, and stayed with Dércio until his father arrived, that he had woken up and even was able to eat a bit. But he continued with daily convulsions for more than 2 weeks – and the only treatment is to just keep giving the IV drip of Quinine and hope he got better. The nurse attending him told us she’d had the same disease recently – she went through 44 IV bags of the drug before she finally improved.

After more than 2 weeks of continual convulsions and with the Quinine not seeming to help much, Dércio’s father made a big decision: He told the nurses that he was going to take Dércio out of the hospital and take him out into the country to receive Traditional Medicine treatment.

When I got news of this at school, I wanted to cry. I’m a strong believer in modern medicine to the point that I plan to become a medical doctor beginning next year. The thought of taking one of my favorite students out into the bush to breathe in herbal steam treatments and get rubbed with plant juice was horrifying to me. I thought it the equivalent to letting him die.

I went to the school director and asked why we couldn’t have taken Dércio to Maputo in the school car. He could get better treatment there, but his family didn’t have the money for transport! We can’t do that, my director told me, because then there would be some student every week who would expect us to do that.

What dangerous logic that is to me. I can’t save this person because then everyone will want to be saved. That aside, it’s not every week that a student is close to death from cerebral malaria. If it had been up to me, I would have acted differently. But there was nothing I could do – and, he was already in the bush and his family refused to tell the school how to contact him.

I was saddened, and again shocked to learn that, just days before Dércio had been taken for traditional treatment, the wife of one of the teachers at the technical school, also ill with cerebral malaria, had also been taken by her family to receive traditional treatment. After a week, she passed away, leaving her husband and a small young daughter. The teacher has been wearing black every day since her funeral, and every time I see him I can’t help but think how insignificant my own daily troubles are, and, until today, I always also couldn’t help but imagine the worst for Dércio, too.

And now – a miracle. Today, more than a month after he collapsed during computer class, Dércio came back to school. As I stood in the corridor discussing some grammar questions with an English teacher, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around, and to my joy (and disbelief!) there stood Dércio with a sheepish grin. “I’m back!” he said and held out his arms for a hug.

“Dércio is resurrected from the dead!” said the other teacher with a laugh and gave him a hug too. I laughed, but the joke was a bit too close to home for my liking. I just kept patting him on the shoulder and telling him how happy I was he had come back. He told us that after a few days of traditional treatment, his family had decided that it was not working and so scraped together the money to get him to Maputo. There, he’d been put in a private, intensive-care unit room in the Central Hospital and finally, after many more days of treatment, got better.

He thanked us for all the support we had given him, “I don’t remember anything after I fainted at school,” he said, “but I heard you came every day and even brought me milk.” I told him what a scare he had given me. As all the teachers and students passed by, each stopped in shock and shook his hand, gave hugs, welcomed him back. And the common theme to all – “Graças a Deus” – thanks be to God.