Happy birthday to the baby born in the tree

Anyone remember the floods of 2000 when hundreds died in Mozambique and thousands were displaced? The time when the South African military dispatched helicopters to save people trapped by the floodwaters and they pulled 15 000 people to safety? Anyone remember the remarkable story of the baby born in a tree and subsequently rescued?
Well, her name is Rosita Mabuiango and she turns 17 today.
‘It’s just a different way of being born,’ says Rosita, whose dramatic rescue helped raise funds for thousands of people. The images of Rosita draped in dirty linen, moments after she and her mother were winched to safety by a helicopter, touched the world, helping raise funds for tens of thousands of flood survivors. “I think it’s God who chose that I be born that way,” Rosita said while sitting in her godmother’s house in the capital, Maputo.
Torrential floods had forced the heavily pregnant Carolina Chirindza and other family members into a tree with no food or water. While clinging to its branches, Chirindza went into labour. Her mother-in-law held a capulana (a long sarong) under her to catch the baby and prevent it from falling into the crocodile-infested waters. The baby was named Rosita after her grandmother.
Four and a half months after she was born, Rosita and her mother travelled to Washington to lobby the US Congress for expanded aid to help tens of thousands of Mozambicans affected by the catastrophe.
Rosita’s treetop birth helped cast the spotlight on an impoverished country overwhelmed by floods. Nearly 800 people died in the disaster.
She wants to study petrochemical engineering, a strategic career choice with the recent discovery of gas reserves off the coast of Mozambique.