This Is Paradise

The family car plunges into a frigid harbor; the mother escapes but her four-month-old daughter drowns. Four years later, that mother loses her four-month-old son to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Twenty-two years later, her twenty-five-year-old son drowns in Malawi, a place he considered "paradise." That mother, Irishwoman Mags Riordan, endured those three tragedies, and became changed in a very different way after the third. In 2000, while bringing a memorial stone to the village where Billy Riordan drowned the year before, Mags saw paradise. But she also saw need in an area with one doctor for 800,000 people. Four years later, she opened the Billy Riordan Memorial Clinic in Cape Maclear, Malawi, where a volunteer staff of international doctors and nurses has tended to 275,000 patients. This is a story about motherhood, grief, healing, and traveling into the unknown, showing keenly how one person indeed can change the world, with little more than two hands and one broken heart