A nurse's journey from treating Covid in Brazil to death in the US desert

[Judi Lynn]

Lenilda dos Santos left her home in rural Amazonia, part of a South American exodus driven by a coronavirus-era depression

by Tom Phillips in Vale do Paraíso

Mon 18 Oct 2021 00.00 EDT

As coronavirus tore through the Valley of Paradise, a farm-flanked backwater in the Brazilian Amazon, Lenilda dos Santos, a nurse technician, stood on the frontline clutching hands most feared to touch.

“She was a warrior during the pandemic,” said Lucineide Oliveira, a friend and colleague at the town’s small, understaffed hospital. “She’d say: ‘If we have to die, we’ll die. But we must fight.’”
But one morning in early August, as the two women sat at the entrance to their Covid ward, Lenilda announced she was leaving. “When?” Lucineide asked her friend. “Soon,” Lenilda replied, adding words of reassurance: “I’ll be back.”

Two days later Lenilda, 49, headed out of town past a sculpture of a Bible open at Psalm 121. “The Lord will keep you from all harm – he will watch over your life,” the inscription reads.

She never returned. Five weeks later and more than 4,000 miles north, US border patrol agents found Lenilda’s body in the desert near the town of Deming, New Mexico. She was curled up by a mesquite bush, wearing light brown tactical boots and army fatigues, and had little with her but a blue Brazilian passport tucked into a waist bag.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/18/brazil-migrant-death-us-border-desert-dream