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The Current Transcript for August 5, 2016

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

They took the diamond through Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai. They tell everybody that it’s like the crown jewels. They try to get you to think this is something even bigger than what the queen has.

LAURA LYNCH: Author and journalist Matthew Hart has held it in his hands—a diamond the size of a tennis ball. A diamond owned by a Vancouver mining company. A diamond that some believe would fetch a record-breaking multimillion-dollar price at auction in London. But it didn’t happen. The story of why it failed is laced with intrigue and talk of assassination. And then…

SOUNDCLIP

I was bloated, swollen and spent 15 days in bed with diarrhea. I had fever and headaches. My hand went numb. To this day, I do not feel my two fingers.

LL: Alessandra de Souza Amorim had been pregnant before but it was never like this. The Brazilian woman had the Zika virus and later gave birth to a child with microcephaly. CBC’s Dr. Brian Goldman travelled to the epicentre of the Zika outbreak earlier this year. We’ll reprise his documentary today. I’m Laura Lynch and you’re listening to the summer edition of The Current.

Intrigue and greed: the failed auction of a 1,109 carat diamond

Guests: Matthew Hart

SOUNDCLIP

At 1,109 carats, the Lesedi La Rona is the largest gem quality rough diamond to have been unearthed in over a century. No diamond of this size and quality has been found since the legendary Cullinan diamond of 1905, the polished diamonds from which now decorate the British crown jewels. Approximately the size of a tennis ball, it is a discovery of a lifetime. Imagine the possibilities.

LL: The possibilities, the potential, all lie within a remarkable stone, a diamond that Sotheby’s auction house in London was sure would attract record-breaking multimillion-dollar bids. A diamond discovered by a Vancouver mining company. And a diamond that was to be sold at public auction rather than through the usual route in the diamond trade. All the more surprising then, it was a spectacular failure with bids not even raising to the base price needed to sell. Journalist Matthew Hart has written about diamonds before and he gained exclusive access to the story behind the story of the failed auction of the Lesedi La Rona diamond. It is a tale full of twists and turns. Matthew Hart’s story of how not to sell a multimillion-dollar diamond appears today in Vanity Fair magazine and he joins me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

MATTHEW HART: Hey Laura.

LL: We just heard that description of the Lesedi La Rona diamond. You actually held the diamond in your hand. What was that like?

MATTHEW HART: [chuckles] Well, it was remarkable. I read about the discovery of the diamond and well, naturally, I was astonished at the size. They’re almost always smashed in the mill. They’re smashed in the recovery process. You later on find out that there was a diamond that size and that here’s a nice bit of it, but we didn’t get the whole thing because the [unintelligible] is broken. And when I looked at it, I thought, you know, how did they get that? How did they even recover something 1,100 carats? Because the biggest diamond ever recovered, the Cullinan diamond at 3,000 carats, was a total fluke. Somebody spotted it in the mine, the sun glinted on it and they were able to recover it. But this one was recovered through the normal—well, not normal as it turned out—but through the industrial process of a diamond mill. So naturally, I thought I wonder if there’s any chance I could see it. Generally, they don’t let you see it. It’s very secretive. They’re only going to show it to potential buyers. You’ll never find out who bought it. You’ll never find out what they paid for it. Well, the company’s called Lucara Diamond Corp. It’s a small Vancouver miner. One of the directors is someone that I had written about years before. She was a geologist. So I sent her a note and said if I can get into Vanity Fair, how about you let me see the diamond? So she pitched it to the CEO and called me back and said yeah, for sure. But there were a lot of hoops I had to jump through before that.

LL: Yeah, you had to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

MATTHEW HART: Yeah, I had to sign—I wasn’t going to be able to write anything about the diamond or even say that I had seen the diamond until five days after its sale.

LL: Okay, but in exchange for that, you got access.

MATTHEW HART: In exchange for that, I had access—not only to the diamond—but to their counsels. To their scheming, their evolution of tactics and a strategy for selling the diamond because they weren’t sure at that point, how they were going to sell it.

LL: And in the article itself, you describe that moment when you get into the vault, so to speak, and the gentleman tells you to close your eyes and he drops it into your hands.

MATTHEW HART: I went into this room at their offices in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana—a typical sort of room where people sell diamonds. They have very high quality goods. White sheets of papers, strong fluorescent lights over—they’re always under florescent lights—the paper so you can see the diamonds against white, and then there’s a little scale there, you can weigh the diamond. This thing wouldn’t fit into the scale, of course. There’s a colour machine—it wouldn’t fit into the colour machine. So first of all, he showed me a bunch of other diamonds to sort of warm me up, like 200 carats, 300 carats. You know, the rubbish. Then he said okay and he went to get the diamond. I saw him come back into the room and he was carrying sort of like a Ziploc bag, just this ordinary Ziploc bag. He said now close your eyes. So I closed my eyes and held out my hands. Plop. In comes this very heavy, cold, jagged, rough on one side, very smooth on the other side piece and I opened my eyes and there it was. Oddly, one of the first things I thought of was all of those stories I’d read about large diamonds shattering at a tap because they’re very hard but at the same time they can have flaws that render them extremely susceptible to cleavage. And I thought, you know, am I going to be the guy who turns this from 1,109 carats—

LL: Don’t drop it.

MATTHEW HART: To you know, 550 times two? So—

LL: So you actually said this is Lucara’s diamond. What is not normal about how they mine that allowed them to harvest this huge stone?

MATTHEW HART: Lucara knew from their sampling and from modelling, they knew they had a population of large diamonds. So right away, William Lamb who is the CEO of Lucara and was a long-time metallurgist for DeBeers, his expertise is totally in how to recover diamonds, how to get the most diamonds out of the dirt that diamonds come in. So he doesn’t want to feed them through the normal recovery process because he’ll smash them to bits. One big diamond is worth more than the sum of its parts. A 500-carat diamond is worth more than five 100-carat diamonds, by far. They’re all worth a lot, of course. But to recover normal diamonds, you smash them up into little bits—the rock into little bits—then it goes through a series of processes that reduce the rock to the heaviest minerals because diamond is a very heavy mineral. And you have this stream of heavy minerals that flows along a conveyor belt and diamonds contain impurities that fluoresce under x-ray. In normal recovery, a photo multiplier detects any burst of fluorescence that says that’s a diamond, and an air jet blasts the diamond from the stream. It’s very accurate actually, the system, recovers about 95 per cent. But if you have a population of large diamonds, they’re going to be recovered from big chunks of rock. You don’t want to smash them down so they can go through this system so what Lamb did was adapt that system so that all it did was say is this carbon or is it not carbon? And basically, the machine is looking at this stream of rock—broken rock—and it’s looking down and it wants to find carbon and it’s going no, no, no, no, yes. And when it says yes, pow—off it goes and down a chute and that’s what happened to the 1,109-carat diamond where it was found in the morning by flabbergasted sorters.

LL: It must have been a big yes. [laughs]

MATTHEW HART: The thump it made.

LL: You talked about William Lamb and his background. What was his interest or Lucara’s interest in letting you see what was going to happen with this?

MATTHEW HART: Well, they had a unique property and they wanted to find a different way to sell diamonds. Here’s the problem they faced: too much of a good thing. When you look at their catalogues, they sell their big stones—200 carats, 300 carats—they sold an 813-carat the month before the auction that we’re going to talk about. They sold them by sealed tender to the trade. So the trade are the people who are going to buy them, polish them into jewels and sell them. So with this stone, they wanted to see if there was a way—well, not to put too fine a point upon it—if there was a way that they could right around the trade and have all the money. So instead of selling the diamond to somebody for a good rough price, then he’s going to polish it and add on his margin, they’d like to get all of that.

LL: They wanted to get rid of the middleman, in other words.

MATTHEW HART: They wanted to cut out the middle—see if they could—as Lamb put it, dip into a new pool of capital. And the way he wanted to sell it was by encouraging people to look at it not as an object to be cut and polished, but as a uniquely beautiful object all by itself. This is a very seductive kind of thinking to diamond people because people who really love diamonds think polished diamonds are just rough that’s been ruined.

LL: Yeah, and you say in the article, you call it or compare it to being like a Picasso and that’s the way he wanted to sell it, like as a piece of art.

MATTHEW HART: He wanted to sell it as a unique—if you buy this, you’re going to have something that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. Like a Picasso. It’s one of a kind. And plus, you have the backup of—if you ever want to extract your 80 million, 90 million, 100 million dollars from it, then you can polish it into jewels and sell it into the diamond trade.

LL: So he’s trying to disrupt the system. He welcomes you to come and look at him doing this so he must have some confidence in the way he’s going about it. But let’s talk about what the system is that he’s trying to disrupt in a little more detail. How long has the system worked this way and what exactly happens?

MATTHEW HART: Basically it’s always worked that way, since the evolution of the modern diamond trade, which supplies the world with tens of millions of carats of diamonds a year. The normal route for these large goods would be to be sold into, to diamantaires, diamond polishers, jewelers in fact—

LL: That’s a great word. Diamantaires. Okay.

MATTHEW HART: Diamantaires who have specialty trade in high-end goods. They have aligned to the people who are going to buy them, the oligarchs and shakes, the one per cent, people who buy $100 million-dollar apartments in New York. So they know these people, they have them in the rolodex, or whatever kind of file they maintain. So normally, these people would buy the rough from Lucara, Lucara sells to them. First, they look at it. They try to calculate what they can get out of it. They hope to cover any possible mistakes because they can always have a disaster. Stone can blow up on the wheel if there’s a fault that they don’t see. It can literally shatter. They might find the colour goes off. But once they’ve made their guess, they buy the diamond and then they decide how to cut it. They cut it and sell it and slap on a great big margin.

LL: In the case of the Lesedi La Rona, what was the value of the diamond uncut that he was thinking he would get for it?

MATTHEW HART: I know that Lucara was expecting somewhere in the sort of, you know, hundred million-dollar range. That’s what they were thinking of.

LL: Wow.

MATTHEW HART: That was kind of the bar they hoped to clear.

LL: Okay. Tell me about the diamantaires. There’s one in particular who you focus in on in your article.

MATTHEW HART: Well, I focus on Laurence Graff because Graff is kind of the uber dealer of the high-end diamond dealers. He’s the avatar of that trade. Graff—there’s nobody like Graff and I’m dead certain that Graff would tell you that himself. Graff has a store in New Bond Street in London and he’s famous. He’s famous as the kind of guy who sells—not the kind of guy, the guy—who sells stones to people who own countries. He’s polished great diamonds. He polished the 603-carat Lesotho Promise into a sort of a 27-stone necklace. I don’t think he’s sold it yet. He also polished a very, very famous blue stone called the Wittelsbach blue. There was a 35-carat blue that had belonged to the Bavarian royal family, a famous diamond. And he bought it and improved it by polishing it down to 31 carats. Improving, he said the cut, most people in the diamond world thought it was an act of complete vandalism. But Graff’s only calculation would be: can I sell it for more money than I paid for it?

LL: Okay, so how is he viewing William Lamb and his plan to go around the middleman?

MATTHEW HART: To Graff and to people like Graff, it’s anathema. They know that the money Lamb is trying to get, the extra money Lamb is trying to get, is their money. He’s trying to pick their pocket. So they’re totally against it. Now, this sets up what happened to William Lamb because these people are a huge powerful force. Anybody who’s going to buy the diamond will want to know what their opinion is of the underlying polished value.

LL: You went to the auction. It’s auction day. The Lesedi La Rona is there at Sotheby’s on display. Set the scene for me.

MATTHEW HART: Alright. Well, this is the result of a six-month publicity blitz. And then they toured the diamond. They took the diamond through Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai—all these places where billionaires reside. They tell everybody that it’s like the crown jewels. They try to get you think this is something that is even bigger than what the queen has, like you’re going to get something that’s very, very special. The night of the auction rolls around, and here’s this swanky auction room on the second floor of Sotheby’s in Bond Street in London.

LL: And what kind of shape was William Lamb in? Was he confident? Was he worried?

MATTHEW HART: Well, of course he wasn’t getting any sleep. I don’t suppose he slept a wink in a couple of months. It’s a huge amount of responsibility for him. Instead of just selling the diamond into the trade and pocketing maybe $65, $70 million, having you know—that’s pretty good, it’s not nothing—and instead, he takes what is after all a chance? Nothing like this has ever been sold. Nothing this big and important has been sold at a public auction. He wants it sold like a Picasso. So all these people, well-dressed, rich and a lot of high-end diamantaires—not Graff—but Graff’s son, and some of his employees were there.

LL: And so the bidding starts.

MATTHEW HART: The bidding starts.

LL: At?

MATTHEW HART: They started at $50 million. Lamb is sitting in about the fifth row, he’s wearing a tux and all of the other Lucara people are wearing a tux. They’re all sitting there waiting, you know, this is going to be their moment of triumph. The bidding starts at $50 million and right away, you knew it was going nowhere. It was just going to fall flat on its face. That’s what it felt like to me. My heart practically stopped. Because when I talked to Lamb about this before and I said, how are you going to know that you’ve succeeded? And he said, when a forest of bidding paddles shoots up into the air, then I’ll know that we have all kinds of people interested and the trade will have to contend with them. Instead, $50 million. $51 million. And then after too long a time, $52 million. Finally, after an excruciating amount of time—it must have been five minutes—dragging it up in increments of like $500,000, they got up to $61 million, banged the sale to a close. That was below the reserve price set by Lucara. Consequently, it failed to sell and the room was stunned.

LL: And so were you, I take it?

MATTHEW HART: I was completely stunned. Because you can’t spend that much time with the process, without becoming something of a follower of the stone.

LL: And this was your story, this was your—

[crosstalk]

MATTHEW HART: And not only that, I had my story for Vanity Fair totally written and all I had to do was drop the figure in. I had, you know, a bold new way to sell diamonds the first time ever, and all of a sudden, bang. A flop.

LL: So after you got over the shock, you started looking into why and that presented even another deeper story. Tell me about that.

MATTHEW HART: Well, I thought—actually, what’s happened says more about the diamond trade than a successful sale would have said because it shows the power of the trade and their ability, at that point, to assassinate Lamb, which is how I described it in my piece. And I think that that’s what it was. They were trash-talking that stone for weeks ahead of the sale. I know because I heard a lot of it. We don’t like it. We think it’s a big risk. What if we polish it and we find out it’s not a D colour?—which is the top white colour that all these various reports that had been circulated said it was—maybe it’s not a D, you know, there goes 40 per cent of the value. So, there was a lot of trash talk. And I heard it in New York, people saying, you know, I don’t know, I hear it’s a little sleepy—which means it doesn’t have so much brilliance. You know, I hear maybe it’s not a D, maybe it’s got a little yellow. Well, you know? Baloney, because the price got up to $61 million. When you add in the premium the buyer would have had to pay Sotheby’s, that’s $68 million--68.1 I think—million dollars US. Who’s paying $68 million if the stone’s not a top colour diamond. Nobody. So I think the trade basically did Lamb in. And I think it might have been a little short-sighted because if I were in the trade, if I were a high-end dealer, I would not want that company for my enemy. I would not want William Lamb to have a grudge against me. I’m not saying he’s not a businessman and ultimately he’ll sell his diamonds to whoever is ready to pay for them and polish them, but people have a long memory.

LL: And he has that much power?

MATTHEW HART: Well, he has the goods. This is the top producing mine of all time for these top goods. They just refitted the mine. This year, they’ll be able to recover a diamond up to 3000 carats, if they find it. And next year, up to 5000 carats. If they get that, that’s a diamond the size of a softball.

LL: [chuckles] What was William Lamb’s reaction that day? And what did he do with the Lesedi La Rona?

MATTHEW HART: Well, Lamb was ashen faced. I felt awful for him because I really like him a lot. He’s a very infectious man and he tried to do something very bold. I think they’ll abandon the auction route completely. They’ll never do that again. In less than a month of the failed auction, he had an offer for substantially more than the auction price, the failed auction price. And it was not from a diamantaire. It was from somebody outside the diamond trade. Now, he didn’t accept that offer in the end, because it wasn’t high enough. He knows what he’s got. They’re not going to be panicked into getting rid of that diamond.

LL: But—

[crosstalk]

MATTHEW HART: Because they had offers immediately. As soon as he stood up when the auction was like finished, he was just absolutely mobbed by people trying to ground feed.

LL: But wasn’t one of the lessons of the failed auction that he was simply too greedy?

MATTHEW HART: He’s the chief executive officer of a public company so he only has one duty and that’s to his shareholders, to get the most money. So greed, in that sense, is what he’s paid to have. And they’re all in business. In diamonds, there isn’t a big sort of—

LL: There’s no big streak of—

[crosstalk]

MATTHEW HART: Charitable side to the game. It’s not that kind of business. I think he will find a particular way to sell those very, very special stones. He may sell this one to the trade, who knows, because there’s a lot of interest in it and it’s now a famous stone with a dramatic story attached to it. The story of the failed auction. It’s got all this glamour. But I don’t think that’s damaged its price. Plainly, it didn’t damage its price because he had those offers very soon after. So, we’ll see how he sells the next big diamond.

LL: And a great story, it is, Matt. Thank you very much.

MATTHEW HART: Okay, thank you.

LL: Matthew Hart is the author of A Diamond Too Big for The Ritz, which you can read in the September issue of Vanity Fair. It hits newsstands today. And you can find a link to the story on our website with pictures of the diamond. Matthew Hart joined me in studio in Toronto. I’m Laura Lynch and you’re listening to the summer edition of The Current.

ENCORE: Zika's Ground Zero: Brazil hits 4,000 suspected Zika-related cases of birth defects

LL: Hello, I’m Laura Lynch and you’re listening to the summer edition of The Current. Well tonight, the Olympics will officially open in Rio de Janeiro. Mounting the Games is never easy for a host city, but the road to Rio has been particularly rocky. Crime, political upheaval, contaminated competition waters and of course, the Zika virus, loom over everything. The outbreak that began in Brazil has spread most recently to Florida. Earlier this week, the government of Canada and the US Centers for Disease Control issued warnings telling pregnant women to avoid travelling to Miami, where 15 cases of Zika have now been confirmed. But Brazil remains Zika's ground zero. And that is where the CBC's Dr. Brian Goldman went earlier this year to speak with families and officials as they struggle with more than 4,000 babies with suspected Zika-related birth defects, a number that is only growing. This is Brian Goldman's documentary, Stray Bullets.

[Sound: Children playing]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: The sound of sibling rivalry needs no translation. Vitoria, age eight, and Vivian, age four, fight playfully for dibs on a toy motorcycle whose batteries are running down. Their mother, Alessandra de Souza Amorim, lets them sort things out for themselves. The 34-year-old mother has enough on her plate: four daughters and now a nearly four-month-old son with microcephaly caused by the Zika virus.

[Alessandra speaking Portuguese]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: The prince of the house. Samuel?

ALESSANDRA DE SOUZA AMORIM: Yes, Samuel.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: My late father’s name was Samuel.

ALESSANDRA DE SOUZA AMORIM: [Through translator] It was?

BRIAN GOLDMAN: He’s beautiful.

[Woman speaks in Portuguese]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Who does he look like?

ALESSANDRA DE SOUZA AMORIM: [Through translator] I don’t know. They say he looks like the girls. I don’t think they look similar. He has the blue eyes, the same colour as my brother who died.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Sorry to hear that. How old was he?

ALESSANDRA DE SOUZA AMORIM: [Through translator] He died one year ago when he was 20 years old. There was a shootout and it hit him. The bullet. A stray bullet.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Stray bullets also describes the random way the Zika virus is picking off babies in and around Campina Grande.

[Sound: Cars in traffic]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: This is a poor city of just over 400,000 in the state of Paraiba in the northeastern part of Brazil. Up the street, a line-up for a soup kitchen stretches to the end of the block.

[Sound: Knock on door]

[Man speaks in Portuguese]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Jonathas Oliveira de Lima from the health secretariat knocks on the door of a local resident. He’s with the city’s mosquito combat and control program. It doesn’t take long to find what he’s looking for: Larvae of Aedes aegypti – the mosquito strongly suspected to be the vector of Zika – nesting in a basin filled with standing water. Oliveira de Lima scoops a tiny spoonful of larvicide from a canvas shoulder bag and pours it in the water. In Canada, public health officials urge residents to get rid of mosquito nests by draining standing water. But here, in Campina Grande, drought conditions mean they can only draw water three times a week. That standing water is to wash clothes, cook, and for some – to drink.

[Sound: Water lapping]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Back at Alessandra’s house, she gives her baby, Samuel, a bath. The short woman with a round face carefully pours tepid water on his back before drying him and rubbing his skin with baby oil.

[Alessandra kisses and coos affectionately to Samuel]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: The family of seven lives in a two-bedroom home made of cinderblocks in Pedregal, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Campina Grande. Alessandra insists on serving me coffee with sugar and crackers. The fridge is empty. No basic sanitation, a huge mosquito infestation and no screen doors to keep them outside. This is ground zero for Zika and for babies with microcephaly. Alessandra was three months pregnant last July when she developed the symptoms of Zika.

ALESSANDRA DE SOUZA AMORIM: [Through translator] I had a lot of pain in the fingers and the joints. This part here that bends is where it hurts the most. I was bloated and swollen and spent 15 days in bed with diarrhea. I had fever and headaches. My hand went numb. When I washed clothes, it swelled up and to this day, I do not feel my two fingers. I don’t feel pain in these two.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: She took Tylenol for her pain and focused her attention on her main preoccupation –the pregnancy.

ALESSANDRA DE SOUZA AMORIM: [Through translator] At five months pregnant, I found out that I was expecting a boy. It was the greatest happiness in the world that I felt. I cried so much in the examination room, even the doctors cried with my happiness.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Alessandra’s joy was short-lived. I ask her if at the time she had any idea that Zika was already creating havoc in Campina Grande.

ALESSANDRA DE SOUZA AMORIM: [Through translator] No, no. We did not know. I wasn’t worried about it. I went to the hospital and the doctor advised me to take Tylenol and a lot of liquid. When it started coming out in the newspaper that this was happening, I got scared and I told my doctor that I had Zika.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: In August 2015, Alessandra had a routine ultrasound. Her doctor noticed that part of the baby’s brain was smaller than normal. Several ultrasounds later, the doctor confirmed the fear she’d been living with through all those scans: that Samuel had microcephaly.

ALESSANDRA DE SOUZA AMORIM: [Through translator] I was despairing. I felt hopeless and I asked if he would live and what would happen and the doctor said it depends on the case. In some cases, the babies live, in others it is stillborn or dies after a short time, and there are cases that the baby lives for a long time. That was when I was completely hopeless. It felt like the ground had been taken out from under me and there was no floor.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Alessandra says saturation media coverage of Zika and microcephaly made the wait for Samuel to be born agonizing. Still, her greatest fear was not microcephaly, but that he’d stillborn. Then, last December 19th, Samuel Amorim Santiago was born by Caesarean section.

ALESSANDRA DE SOUZA AMORIM: [Through translator] It was beautiful when I looked into the eyes of my son for the first time. I cannot even describe the happiness I had. Soon after the Caesarean, the doctor showed me very quickly, and then took him away to clean him and I slept. Then he went to his dad and when I woke up, he was with Samuel and showed me. “Look. Look at how beautiful our son is.” The happiness was so great that for me, nothing else existed, only the two of them near me. He is the love of my life.

[Samuel cries]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: The love of Alessandra’s life – baby Samuel – is at the hospital for his twice-weekly appointment with physiotherapist Jeime Lara Leal. She rolls Samuel’s body on a huge yellow ball to stimulate his back and neck muscles so he can hold up his head on his own, something he needs to master if he’s going to be able to feed himself or even just sit up. Leal says his head control has improved. That Samuel is eating well and gaining weight and crying lustily are good signs. But as a doctor, I can’t help but notice he doesn’t recognize familiar objects. Not even mum. Instead, his eyes dart around aimlessly. I’m not sure he can hear.

[Woman speaks softly; Samuel fusses]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: I see the hallmarks of severe brain damage. His doctor says Samuel is doing better than many of the other babies.

ALBA BATISTA: [Through translator] The virus has the capacity to destroy the developing nervous tissue or prevent its development, causing failures in parts of the brain – cerebrum, the cerebral hemispheres, the brainstem and the cerebellum.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Dr. Alba Batista is a neurosurgeon and director of the Hospital Pedro in Campina Grande, where they’re caring for more than 40 babies with microcephaly. Batista, who has been here since 1999, has never seen anything like it before.

[Dr. Batista speaking Portuguese]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Mental retardation, cognitive and motor disorders, paralysis, seizures.

[Dr. Batista speaking Portuguese]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Batista shows me CT scans of babies who lived and autopsy photos of babies so damaged they were stillborn. Microcephaly, which means abnormally small head size, is the most overt evidence that the baby’s been affected. But it’s inside the baby’s skull that I see the incredible destruction to the developing brain. I understand the technical language. I want to know what she tells the mothers.

ALBA BATISTA: [Through translator] Okay. Your baby could have difficulty walking. Your baby could have difficulty writing. Your baby could have difficulty learning to read. He could not evolve in learning, due to the intellectual difficulty, due to the injury caused by the virus in these areas. Your baby could walk, but maybe with an altered coordination and could more easily fall and get hurt. Your baby could need to take medications to prevent the seizures for the rest of his life.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Wow.

ALBA BATISTA: The walking dead.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: The walking dead.

[Dr. Batista speaking Portuguese]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Difficult is an understatement. Dr. Alba says the hospital is bracing for as many as 50 more babies by June. One mother is expecting twins. Her ultrasound shows both are affected.

[Sound: Heartbeats detected through ultrasound]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Dr. Alba’s dire prediction is in my mind as I watch a pregnant woman get a routine ultrasound at the hospital here in Campina Grande. Her baby is okay. Normal pregnancy has enough uncertainty. Fears of microcephaly take that to a whole new level. Here at ground zero, there are so many unanswered questions: Why did the outbreak start here? Why are some babies affected and not others? How does the mother’s health change the odds?

AMILCAR TANURI: What is remarkable here is that the rate of the kids born with the malformations and microcephaly and obvious brain malformation is very high.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Dr. Amilcar Tanuri is a virologist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro who has come here to help get answers. His lab in Rio recently sequenced the strain of Zika affecting babies in Campina Grande. He says the virus, that in the past caused nothing more than a flu-like illness when it thrived in Africa, has mutated into one that damages the brains of unborn babies. And the worst may be yet to come.

AMILCAR TANURI: The virus is spreading, like in huge amount of population, a huge spread of the virus very fast. You know, six months ago, the virus was in Recife, now is in Mexico. How come, you know? There must be some animal that migrates with the virus and spreads, you know, because it's very, very, very fast.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: The virologist worries that there may be damage to the baby—in addition to microcephaly—that doctors have yet to discover.

[People chatting]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Here at the hospital in Campina Grande, an entire wing has been turned over to babies with microcephaly. In this alcove, the mothers, including Alessandra, swap stories and tips as they wait for their baby’s appointment.

[Women clapping and singing]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: On this day, I count eight with microcephaly, including Igor Kawatu, born the same month as Alessandra’s son Samuel. Igor’s mom is Livia Monteiro. She lives far from Campina Grande and makes a five-hour roundtrip twice a week. Alessandra knew Samuel had microcephaly before he was born. Livia only learned that Igor was affected afterwards.

LIVIA MONTEIRO: [Through translator] I was very sad. I cried a lot. But then after, three days later, I accepted it. I was very sad to know that some things about my son were going to be compromised, but now I have accepted it as normal. For me, he is a normal child.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: It’s a new kind of normal for Livia who is just 20. Her eldest child is two and a half – and was born well before Zika. Livia tells me she won’t have any more kids because Igor will need special care for the rest of his life. So will Livia.

[Woman speaking Portuguese]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Which is why the hospital has recruited psychologist Dr. Jaqueline Loureiro to provide mothers like Livia and Alessandra with counseling and emotional support.

JAQUELINE LOUREIRO: [Through translator] In general, they are women of low socioeconomic status, living on very little money. Most live on Bolsa Familia, a form of government assistance. Most of the women live alone, or with family, but without their partners, their mates.

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Those difficult challenges aside, Loureiro says once the mothers get over the initial shock, they say they’re determined to take care of their kids regardless of their needs. But she thinks they’re in denial of the true extent of the problems in their babies. To the mothers, those tiny yet noticeable differences between normal infants and those with microcephaly can be glossed over, if not ignored, something that will get a lot harder as the babies get older.

JAQUELINE LOUREIRO: [Through translator] For example, at nine months, we expect certain behaviours – that the child can sit up by itself, starts to say a few words. When they get to another developmental phase, in which they are not developing like other children, then we will have to do another evaluation to really understand the grief process that these mothers are going through for this idealized baby. Because until they can fully accept this real baby that they have, we can’t really observe and give an effective response. I think that with a study in a year from now, a year and half, we will be able to understand what impact these babies with microcephaly have on these women.

[Samuel fusses]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Back home after his session with the physiotherapist, Alessandra changes baby Samuel. The psychologist Jaqueline Loureiro wonders how babies like him will be like when they’re nine months old. I worry about how they’ll be when they’re five or 10 or older – if they live that long. Alessandra is focused on Samuel’s needs now – not the future. She sounds like she’s in it for the long haul.

ALESSANDRA DE SOUZA AMORIM: [Through translator] What gave me the most strength were the words of my husband. He gave me a lot of strength. If not for him, I would have entered into a depression because I was crying and researching the disease on the Internet – horrible things that made me scared. But my son, he’s beautiful, isn’t he? What was most comforting was when my husband said, “Wasn’t it our dream to have a son? Okay. Then let’s receive him the way that God gave him to us.” And when he said that, it touched my heart. God knows that I am a special mother to take care of my son.

[Alessandra sings lullaby]

BRIAN GOLDMAN: A special mother who will need all the strength and faith she can muster to get through the difficult months and years ahead.

LL: That is the documentary Stray Bullets, produced by the CBC's Dr. Brian Goldman. It originally aired in April. Thanks to Kate Steiker-Ginzberg for her work, including translating for Brian while in Brazil. Kate is based in Rio. Our documentary editor is Joan Webber. And thanks also to the following Toronto-based actors: Jeannette Sousa was the voice in translation of Alessandra de Souza Amorim. Lidia Ferreira spoke the translated words of Dr. Alba Batista. Lali Michelsen was the voice in translation of psychologist Jaqueline Loureiro. And thanks to Toronto ESL student Clara do Amaral Motta, who voiced the words of Livia Monteiro in English. If you head to our website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent, you can watch a version of the documentary interpreted into American Sign Language by Kathy Munro. An estimated one to three million Canadians are unable to listen to public radio. This is an initiative to make The Current available to everyone. I'm Laura Lynch. The wonderful Connie Walker will be in this chair next week. Thank you for listening to The Current.

[Music: Guitar]

LL: Every year at The Current, we mount a season-long project, bringing you stories connected by a common theme. This year, we're calling our project The Disruptors. Whether it's innovative new technologies, unconventional politicians or seismic shifts in social values, we're living in an age of disruption where big changes threaten to undermine the status quo. And those changes aren't always good. This season, we'll be looking at the good and the bad of our volatile times and asking how these disruptions could change our society and how they already have. But not all disruptions make their way into the headlines, so we're also looking for untold stories that you have. How have your lives been disrupted by unforeseen changes, big or small? We'll be telling those stories in a new series we're calling Moments of Disruption. Whether it was a cross-country move, a sudden epiphany, a debilitating illness, changes in circumstances with consequences you never expected. We'll feature your stories on The Current throughout this season. If you have a story you'd like to share, get in touch. Send us an email through our website at www.cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. And make sure to put "Personal Disruption" in the subject line. That is today's edition of The Current. Stay tuned now to Radio One for Ripple Effect. Anna Maria Tremonti brings us the refugee crisis through the eyes of a child, from children working the streets of Beirut to bring money back to their families, to teenagers who left their countries on their own for a new life in Canada. That is coming up. Now earlier this week, we discussed the complicated legacy of class relations in the United States in my interview with Nancy Isenberg, the author of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. Well of course, one of the best known American working class folk heroes was Woody Guthrie and one of his songs about class struggle has been given new life recently, thanks to a certain American presidential candidate. Guthrie once lived in an apartment building in Brooklyn called Beach Haven Apartments and it was owned by Fred Trump, the father of Donald. And old man Trump makes an appearance in the lyrics. Here is Lucinda Williams performing in Ohio this past March with a cover of the Woody Guthrie song, I Ain't Got No Home. I'm Laura Lynch. The wonderful Connie Walker will be in this chair next week. Thank you for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: Guitar]

LUCINDA WILLIAMS: [Singing] I ain’t got no home, I’m just a-roamin’ ‘round

Just a wandrin’ worker, I go from town to town

And the police make it hard wherever I may go

And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore

My brothers and my sisters are stranded on this road

A hot and dusty road that a million feet have trod

Rich man took my home and drove me from my door

And I ain't got no home in this world anymore

I mined in your mines and I gathered in your corn

I been working, mister, since the day I was born

Now I worry all the time like I never did before

'Cause I ain't got no home in this world anymore

Here comes the Trump verse:

[crowd laughing and cheering]

LUCINDA WILLIAMS: [Singing] Beach Haven ain’t my home

I just can’t pay the rent

My money’s down the drain and my soul is badly bent

Beach Haven looks like heaven, no black ones come to roam

No, no, no, old man Trump

Beach Haven ain’t my home

[crowd cheering]

LUCINDA WILLIAMS: I’m going to do that verse again. It’s a new one, you know, for me, so.

[Singing] Beach Haven ain’t my home

I just can’t pay the rent

My money’s down the drain and my soul is badly bent

Beach Haven looks like heaven, no black ones come to roam

No, no, no, old man Trump

Beach Haven ain’t my home

[crowd cheering]

LUCINDA WILLIAMS: Now, as I look around

It’s mighty clear to see

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August 5, 2016 full episode transcript

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