‘The people in every village they visited were so often mourning the dead’

I was still young and unmarried when Michael Alpers came into Waisa village in 1962 to live there and do research on kuru, which was taking the lives of the people at an alarming rate. I was among the young girls who cleaned up the land to build his house at Yagoenti. My late husband Mr Mabage was a single young man when Michael employed him. He helped in the house and whenever Michael wanted to go out on field patrol he went with him. He was a very handy man in doing fieldwork. He was also asked to go independently to check on kuru patients and report