Millions of AIDS Orphans Strain Southern Africa
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
Published: December 24, 2003
Joao Silva for The New York Times
As the AIDS epidemic continues to devastate Southern Africa, the orphans of the dead are being left to fend for themselves.
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CEMENTO, Mozambique — On the day last July that he and his wife died of AIDS, 36-year-old Samossoni Nhambo leaned up from a hospital bed a few miles from this dirt-road village of thatched huts and asked his preacher a despairing question: who would take care of his children?
Five months later the answer is glaringly obvious: no one.
Three-year-old Fátima died in early December, perhaps from AIDS, perhaps from malnutrition. Five-year-old João, infested with worms that have reduced his toes to red stumps, can walk only on his heels. His 7- and 9-year-old brothers, Ricardo and Samsoan, are covered with dime-size sores from scabies mites, which infect the entire family.
Sixteen-year-old Maria, who dropped out of school to care for her sick parents, was pregnant by a man whom she refuses to identify, and in early December she gave birth to a boy.
That leaves the eldest, José, a slim, short 17-year-old who just finished seventh grade, as the surrogate father. In their half-built shelter of stones and sticks on the bad side of a poor village, with no walls and a single cane chair for furniture, the Nhambo children reel from crisis to crisis.
"Life is very difficult," José said. "No food, no clothing, no bed covers. We have to struggle."
So do millions of others like them. Southern Africa is increasingly home to children like the Nhambos, robbed of their childhood by AIDS and staggering under adult-size hardships.
The United Nations Children's Fund estimates in a new report that 11 million children under 15 in sub-Saharan Africa have lost at least one parent to AIDS. About a third of them have lost both parents. By 2010, Unicef predicts, AIDS will have claimed at least one of the parents of 15 percent of the region's children — 20 million in all.
The social implications are enormous, Unicef and other relief organizations say. Orphans are more likely to drop out of school, to suffer from chronic malnutrition, to live on the street, to be exploited by adults, to turn to prostitution or other forms of crime and to themselves become infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.
African social traditions dictate that relatives should take them in. But AIDS has pushed so many families to the brink that the surviving adults are beginning to turn away their young relatives. An aunt and a grandfather live down a dirt path from the Nhambos, but the grandfather says neither can help them.
So far, governments have done little either: of 40 sub-Saharan countries hit by the AIDS epidemic, only six have plans in place to deal with orphans, Unicef says. Their sheer numbers, plus the state of African bureaucracies, make even the simple act of registering orphans so that they can be exempted from school fees an enormous task. In countries like Zambia only 1 in 10 births is even documented.
For Mozambique, a nation nearly twice the size of California that stretches along the Indian Ocean coast, orphans are not a new phenomenon. When 17 years of civil war finally ended in 1992, hundreds of thousands of children were left without one or both parents.
But AIDS has sharply multiplied their ranks. Now, in a nation of 18 million, 16 percent of the children — more than 1.2 million — are already missing at least one parent. AIDS is responsible for the plight of a third of these children, according to Unicef.
Maria Cemedo, an official of an agency that serves women and children in Sofala, the region where the Nhambo children live, said an entire generation was being lost. "We may become a society of old people and children," she said.
Sofala, in Mozambique's narrow center, has been particularly hard hit because it has both a port and a major highway running to Zimbabwe. The combination of poverty-stricken women and lonely truckers spreads the AIDS virus all along the corridor. Now 1 in 4 adults in the province is infected.
Of the 46,000 registered orphans in the province, said Antônia Charre, the agency's director, few receive any government help. Fewer than 5 percent obtain food through the World Food Program, she said.
"It's a shocking situation," she said. "It is not clear how some of these children survive from one day to the next." |
