MOURNING THE ANGELS OF MERCY

By ANDREW PURVIS/KIKWIT

The Poverelle buried Sister Dinarosa Belleri last week on a hot morning in the plague city of Kikwit. The pallbearers wore green gowns, heavy boots, plastic goggles and white helmets as they pushed a rickety stretcher over the potholes on the road from the main hospital to the Cathedral of St. Francois Xavier. She was the fourth sister to die of the fever, and by this time the nuns had learned to take no chances.

When the cortege reached the graveyard, the women and children who had gathered to watch the gravediggers screamed and scattered, covering their mouths with brightly colored wraps as they ran away. A small group of foreigners and missionaries stayed behind. "I knew her well," sighed Brother Jacques Demestre of the Jesuit mission. "I don't know what the hospital is going to do without her."

The missionaries of Kikwit provide the only semblance of social services in a town where the government exists mainly to extort money. The Italian Poverelle (Little Sisters of the Poor) were the only ones to work in the hospital, and so they were the ones to start dying before they knew how to save themselves. Sister Dinarosa, 48, was the chief administrative nurse. She ran the generator, scrounged the medicines and grabbed supplies from any source she could find to keep the hospital functioning. "Anything that is working here," said Belgian doctor Barbara Kerst`ins, "was run by the nuns."

It was Sister Floralba Rondi, 71, who happened to be attending at the operation on a man named Kimfumu last month, when doctors thought they were just dealing with a perforated ulcer. When they opened him up, however, his gut was dissolving. By the time he died two days later of extensive hemorrhaging, Sister Floralba was already running a high fever. She was treated at the hospital, but when her condition worsened, three of her best friends -- Sister Dinarosa, Sister Clarangela Ghilardi, 64, and Sister Danielangela Sorti, 47 -- put her in the back of their four-wheel drive car and drove her 50 miles west to the clinic in the town of Mosango. She was unconscious when they arrived; the sisters stayed at her bedside all night, praying and soothing and holding her arm so the intravenous drip would stay in place. Sister Floralba died within a few days, and all three sisters caring for her brought the body back to Kikwit.

Sister Floralba had lived in Kikwit most of her life. She was widely known and deeply loved, for her medical skill and her kindness. She often found clothes for the very poor, and food. When she died her body was carried all through the hospital, and then through town to the cathedral, where she lay in an open coffin for two days so her friends could view the body. They stood over her and wept, caressed her face, sang her praises. It was the end of April, and no one knew what had killed her. But they would soon find out.

Within 24 hours of her death, the three sisters who had nursed her all got sick. Sister Clarangela died five days later, followed by Sister Danielangela four days after that. By the time of Sister Clarangela's funeral there were rumors of the deadly Ebola fever loose in the town. So her coffin was not left open for viewing, and the church was only half full. When Sister Dinarosa perished last week, the whole world knew why. Her body was unceremoniously splashed with bleach, wrapped in plastic and buried in a graveyard now sprouting with makeshift wooden crosses.