Helping the Navajo find health: Community health workers in action

Two months ago, the boys played like children do, clambering around a ruined building just down the lush green hillside from their home. Now their mom, Moslene, cooks only for her husband, a mechanical act that brings her no joy. Only sadness and a remembrance of the innocent laughter she will never hear again. Her boys - her only children - are dead. A wall of that ruined building fell on them, killing them instantly.

Moslene's house, a one-story, two-room concrete structure with a wrap-around porch and faded blue and white paint, is noiseless in the muggy morning heat. Her husband is down in...