Fortunately, we had learnt about malaria at school, and Hope told her mother that she needed medicine quickly. Her mother took Hope to the hospital. She didn’t want to lose another child. Two years before, Hope’s baby brother had fallen ill with malaria and died.

At the hospital, the doctor had examined Hope and diagnosed malaria. He had given her an injection and prescribed some medicine. And now she was getting better thanks to the treatment.

We asked if we could see her. We weren’t worried about catching the disease – we knew that malaria was not contagious. At school we had learnt that you catch malaria at night, from female mosquitoes. So we were upset to see that Hope was sleeping without a mosquito net.

We told our friend about a place where her parents could get free mosquito nets. We told her we wanted her to come back to school soon. We know that she was very lucky to recover from this disease that kills one baby every sixty seconds.