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Africa's AIDS Horror 26th December 2003 CEMENTO, Mozambique On the day in July that he and his wife died of AIDS, Samossoni Nhambo, 36, leaned up from a hospital bed a few kilometers 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 Fatima died in early December, perhaps from AIDS, perhaps from malnutrition. Five-year-old Joao, 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 sores from scabies mites, which infect the entire family. Maria, 16, who dropped out of school to care for her sick parents, became pregnant by a man whom she refuses to identify. In early December she gave birth to a boy. That leaves the eldest, Joss, a 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," Jose said. "No food, no clothing, no bed covers. We have to struggle." Southern Africa is increasingly home to children like the Nhambos, robbed of their childhood by AIDS and staggering under adult-size hardships. Unicef, 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 those have lost both parents. By 2010, Unicef says, 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, 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 and crime and to become infected with HIV, 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. Of 40 sub-Saharan countries hit by AIDS, 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 a mammoth task. In Mozambique, 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 missing at least one parent. AIDS is responsible for a third of the deaths, according to Unicef. Maria Cemedo, an official at 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 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 HIV all along the corridor. Now a quarter of adults in the province are 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 is not clear how some of these children survive from one day to the next," she said. Group homes are one possible solution. But as yet, few exist here. The government's only orphanage - by far the largest in this region - houses just 78 boys and girls. Paula Salgado, its coordinator, said 16 children infected with HIV were housed this year at the center in Beira, the nation's second-biggest city. Only four survive today. One of them, Mavis, 5, was taken to the center by government workers in late October, weighing just 11 kilograms, or 24 pounds, and suffering from tuberculosis. Her parents were dead, apparently from AIDS, and her 15-year-old brother was reduced to begging for food from neighbors, Salgado said. Such stories of separation and suffering seem as common as mango trees here. About 100 kilometers, or 60 miles, away, in the village of Nhamatanda, Jorge Danielle, 15, said he had cared for his two younger sisters for four years after his mother died of AIDS. Then, quite recently, a couple who claimed to be friends of his dead parents took the 9- and 12-year-old girls away, he said. He now lives alone and survives on handouts of rice and the pennies he earns by carrying parcels at the local market. "They told me, 'We cannot feed you too, so you must fend for yourself,'" he said. "I am very sad because they are far away from me. Now I am always alone." Amador Ernesto Luis, a volunteer with a Unicef-financed relief group called Asvimo, said he feared the two girls had been taken away for labor or prostitution. But without relatives to care for the children, and in the absence of government help, he said he was powerless to stop the couple. The Nhambo children remain together. But there are few other blessings in their lives. Their hut was always on the bad side of Cemento, far from the highway and the single hand-pumped well that serves 600 people. The Nhambos fed their children rice and sweet potatoes they grew in a tiny kitchen garden. Nhambo never held a steady job. His wife, Caterina Tole, held the family together, said Jose Missasse, a Christian pastor who knew the family well. Their family life began to fall apart five years ago, when Samossoni Nhambo left to live with the wife of a deceased uncle. When he returned, in 1999, Jose said, he and Maria, the eldest children, were not happy to see him. Nor was his mother, he said. "They very seldom spoke," he said. In African culture, a woman is obliged to meet her husband's sexual demands, and so Fatima was born within a year. Missasse, the pastor, said he later recognized the symptoms of AIDS in both parents and the baby. He said he had seen Caterina Tole a month before her death. "She never forgave her husband," he said. "She said, 'I am going to die because of him and leave my children alone.'" Tole died one morning in mid-July, stretched out on the dirt floor of her neighbor's mud hut. Six hours later, Nhambo, too, stopped breathing. No one offered to feed the children - not their mother's sister, who lives with her seven children about 50 paces away, nor their widowed grandfather, a frail 70-year-old in ragtag clothes. The children eat one meal a day of corn porridge, along with 70 other needy children at Missasse's church. Jose said he had planned to carry Fatima on foot to the nearest doctor when he woke up on Dec. 10, surprised she had not roused him as usual with her crying. Neighbors buried her in an unmarked grave between her parents. Exactly a week later, Maria delivered a baby boy, and the scramble to feed another mouth began. Sharon La Franiere -
International Herald Tribune - (The New York Times) |
