This is paradise
Subtitle: an Irish mother's grief, an African village's plight, and the medical clinic that brought fresh hope to both
By: Suzanne Strempek Shea
Edition: First PFP edition.
Publisher: PFP, Inc
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Georgetown, MA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 293
ISBN-13: 9780989237291; 9780991427536
Subjects: Mothers; Biography; Parental grief; Children; Death; Psychological aspects; Clinics; Mères; Biographies; Chagrin chez les parents; Enfants; Mort; Aspect psychologique
Description: Your brakes fail and your car plunges from a pier into a February-frigid harbor. You are thrown to safety but your four-month old daughter, trapped in her car seat, drowns. Four years after that horror, you return from a trip to the shore and lift your four-month-old son from his carrier only to realize he's dead, too, a victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Twenty-two years later, your 25-year old son drowns while swimming in a Malawi, Africa lake. How do you survive that first death, never mind the second, or the third? Ask Mags Riordan of County Kerry, Ireland. 

Only the blessing of her son Billy, the boy who later drowned, carried Mags through those first two deaths. Her reaction to Billy's loss caused Mags to do something beyond simple survival, though — it caused her to do something transformative, and remarkable. Returning to Malawi on the one-year anniversary of Billy's death, she saved the life of a local boy who would otherwise have died from a simple infection, and realized the desperate need for a medical clinic. With virtually no relevant experience, medical or otherwise, Mags founded a clinic that to date has saved and transformed the lives of tens of thousands of Malawians. If any of us wonders "What can one person do?" we need only look to Mags Riordan as a living, breathing example of someone who put aside her despair, and her comfort zone, in an effort to help and heal, proving the world truly can be changed, even by just two hands, and one single broken heart.

This Is Paradise is the story of an Irish mother’s grief, an African village’s plight, and the remote medical clinic that brought fresh hope to both.
Notes: Issued also as an ebook.