LUSAKA, Zambia -- Children of the Plague
It was only two weeks after their mother died from AIDS that their aunt took them to the bus station. She said she did not want to take care of them anymore. She told them to go to
Lusaka, find a police station and ask for an orphanage.
The children, Calvin Katoya and Jackson Kabaso, who would like to be
soccer stars someday, did as they were told, riding the bus an hour
from the small town of Kabwe, then asking strangers where to go. But
the police could not help them. As the days went by, the boys, 12 and
15, slept in the rusting, abandoned cars nearby. They had no money or
food.
Edith and Khuzini Banda lived with their aunt for about year after
their mother died in 1994. But then the aunt said her home was too
crowded. She sent the girls -- then only 13 and 14 -- to live alone in
their mother's house. The girls make do by renting out half the
two-room house for $15 a month, and begging from the neighbors when
food runs out.
The two keep their cinder-block room tidy, decorated with magazine
layouts of models and Hollywood stars. They hope the headmaster will
be lenient about their school fees, which are eight months over due.
Sometimes, said Edith Banda, she is jealous of those who still have
parents. "It would be nice to have someone who cares about us," she
said.
The AIDS epidemic has been raging in Zambia for nearly two decades,
and as the deaths pile up, so do the orphaned children. It is much the
same in many other parts of Africa. In rural areas of East Africa,
four of every 10 children who have lost one parent by age 15 have lost
that parent to AIDS, according to U.N. figures. In 1997 alone, the
disease orphaned 1.7 million children, more than 90 percent of them in
Africa south of the Sahara.
But it is Zambia, a landlocked county in southern Africa that has
never embraced birth control, that has the highest proportion of
orphaned children in the world, according to the United Nations. Here,
an estimated 23 percent of all children under 15 are missing one or
both parents, many of them dead from AIDS, and the numbers are
expected to keep rising.
For now, most of the children have been absorbed into extended
families. Almost 75 percent of all households are taking care of at
least one orphan. But in this country, where half of all households
are living in extreme poverty, the strain of caring for extra children
is beginning to take its toll. Many children are being squeezed out.
In 1991 Lusaka had 35,000 children living on the street. Today there
are more than 90,000.
Zambian officials believe the number of adults infected with HIV, the
virus that causes AIDS, will not decline before 2010, which means that
the orphan population will not peak until 2020. Recent U.N.reports
estimate that there are now nearly half a million orphaned by the
disease in Zambia. That number is expected at least to double in the
coming decade, further straining the country's meager resources.
The Orphans: Even Within Families, Many Are Outcasts
Experts say that already the orphans are suffering. When
there is not enough to eat, orphans often get less than the other
children in the household. They are also often the last to get shoes
and the last to go to school. In the rural areas, girls are being
married off at 12 or 13, far younger than the usual age of 18. The
reason: the family no longer has to feed the girl and, in keeping with
local custom, can claim a bride price.
Advocates for the children say the orphans are more likely to be
forced to work long hours, to suffer from beatings and to experience
sexual abuse. "When you start talking about the rising number of orphans, you are
quickly talking about a rise in all these related issues -- child
labor, child abuse and sexual abuse," said Stephan Dahlgren, a project
officer with Unicef based in Zambia. "The more vulnerable children you
have, the more the problems escalate."
Despite the huge number of people infected with HIV in Zambia, there
is little planning for death. Most people are never tested for AIDS
and would not admit to it even if they did find out they are infected.
Only among the educated elite is this beginning to change.
The Shelters: Help for Children Hardened by Life:
Zambian health authorities believe that the prevalence of
HIV here will peak this year because recent surveys report significant
behavioral changes. But even that seems like bitter news: The
infection rate in urban areas is expected to plateau at 28 percent. In
rural areas, experts calculate, it will be 22 percent, giving Zambia
one of the world's highest infection rates.
As is the case elsewhere in Africa, the vast majority of infected
Zambians are between 15 and 40, meaning that they are dying when they
should be in their most productive years. This, combined with
wide-scale layoffs as the government tries to retool a socialist
economy by selling off state-owned businesses, has made it all the
more difficult for families to absorb the growing number of orphans.
Children, orphaned or not, have hard lives in Zambia. Nearly half are
stunted from a lack of food, about 20 percent severely so.
"Everybody knows about AIDS," Dahlgren said. "If you go into a small
village and ask a chief about AIDS, he knows all about it. But when it
comes down to 'What is this disease that so and so died from?' then
it's tuberculosis or malaria."
Many orphans are losing both their parents and all their inheritance
at the same time. Relatives quickly swoop in and grab property, be it
cooking pots or farm land, and the children have little to say about
it. In theory, they could appeal to the courts, but few Zambians have
the wherewithal and the money to do so.
Florence and Veronica Phiri once lived comfortably with their parents
in the modest house they owned. Their father was an electrician. But
in 1994 both parents died within months of each other. The girls were
8 and 6.
Within weeks, their father's family took over the house and sent the
girls to live with an aunt in a rural village. There, the girls said,
they were beaten and had to work long hours fetching water and
collecting wood.
Two years later, their mother's relatives intervened and brought the
girls back to Lusaka to live with their maternal grandmother, who
sells vegetables in the market. Florence and Veronica and four cousins
who are also orphans spend most days playing in the dusty streets in
front of their grandmother's dilapidated house.
Florence and Veronica have nothing that ever belonged to their parents
and do not expect they ever will. At her grandmother's, Florence said,
some days there is no food. But she is still glad to be there. "It is much better than before,"
she said, shyly adjusting her ragged clothes.
This year a community group donated money for her school fees, a
school uniform and shoes. But Veronica will have to wait; there was
not enough money for her. Elsewhere in this city, as the sun sets, casting shadows over the
modern government-sponsored high rises, entire families settle in for
the night on the sidewalks. Scattered among them are the ragged street
children, many of whom make money as prostitutes and look for any
means to get high.
The Hard Numbers:
In countries across Africa, tuberculosis, hepatitis, malaria, measles
and cholera -- all wholly preventable -- have surged mercilessly.
Cases of malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases have surged across
Africa as national health systems have become overwhelmed.
Workers at the Fountain of Hope, a nonprofit organization that works
with the street children, say the children have even found a way of
getting a powerful high from fermented human feces, a substance known
as jekem. In the daylight, many idle the hours away kicking a soccer ball around
outside the Fountain of Hope headquarters. The organization is trying
to offer them a special four-year education program that will ready
them for school exams. But the street children here are like street
children everywhere -- hardened and focused on immediate survival.
The stories the children tell of fear, rejection and loneliness are
numbingly similar. Simon Phiri, who is 14 but looks about 10, can not
even remember when his parents died. Slumped in a chair, he peels the
dirt from his palms as he talks sullenly about his short life. For a
while, he said, he stayed with his mother's best friend. But after a
while, he left. "They were always insulting me," he said. "They always ate when I went
out and never saved me anything. ''
He said he has spent many nights sleeping in the aisles of the local
market place. But now he sleeps on the floor of a friend's older
brother's house. He must get his own food, though, and he has no money
for soap. He earns money doing odd jobs in the market, he said. The
counselors said that he has a sexually transmitted disease. Nearly
half the boys do.
Simon has not been to school in at least four years, though he hopes
to be an accountant when he grows up. "I would like to work in an
office," he said, suddenly brightening.
Finding homes for the street children is not really a possibility, say
center employees. There are only a handful of very small orphanages in
Zambia, including the Kabwata Orphanage, where Calvin and Jackson
ended up after three days without food. Eventually the police
contacted Lorraine Miyanda, who runs the place, and she bent the rules
to admit the boys. Usually the orphanage will not take children over
the age of 10.
But Ms. Miyanda said she has little hope that anyone will ever take
the boys into a new home. In many African countries there is little
tradition of taking in children who are not blood relatives and formal
adoption is extremely rare. Child advocates say that this may be a
particular problem in the future because of the way AIDS tends to
devastate whole families, particularly in villages.
"The extended family in Africa is far better than in the West about
taking in relatives.," said Mark Louden, a South African who is
writing a book on AIDS orphans. "There is no formality about taking
care of cousins. They slip right into saying 'Mom.' In Africa you have
30 Moms. The problem is that AIDS doesn't usually take just one woman
in a family; it tends to take all the wives of the brothers because
the brothers tend to behave similarly."
The Caring Adults: Grandmothers Help, but When They Go ... :
In the last few years, dozens of fledgling organizations
have sprung up in Zambia to try to help the children. But there is
virtually no government money available and many of the organizations
are staffed only by volunteers. "It's not that the government in unsympathetic," said Louis Mwewa, the coordinator of Children in Need, an umbrella organization that tried
to represent the groups. "But we are a poor country and they do not
have money."
In Matero, one of Lusaka's poorer neighborhoods, where small houses
with tin roofs stretch for miles, overwhelmed grandmothers and
households that are a collection of siblings living on their own are
easy to find. In one house, Brenda Tembo, 52, cares for 14 of her
grandchildren.
On a recent afternoon, no one in her household had eaten yet: there
was no food in the house. Mrs. Tembo was waiting for someone to buy
tomatoes from her vegetable stand before buying corn meal, which would
feed more of them for less. Five children in the household should be
in school, but there is no money for tuition. There is barely enough room for all the children to lie down on the floor at night. The homemade plywood table and the three rickety
chairs must be put outside when it is bedtime. "I am not alone like
this." she said, pointing across the dirt road at another house.
"Right over there, it is the same."
While the grandmothers struggle with the burden of feeding and
clothing the children, some child advocates are more worried about
those who are growing up in the households run by siblings, where
chaos sometimes reigns. Like the Banda girls, the Zulu siblings survive on the rent they
receive from their parents' house in a neighborhood called Kuanda
Square. The seven children live in the back in a tumbledown two-room
structure. But recently the oldest boy got married and set up his own
household, leaving less money for the rest of the children, who range
in age from 19 to 11. The 19-year-old is known in the neighborhood as
a drinker who regularly beats the younger ones.
On a recent visit, there was no food in the dank-smelling house. Shoes
and dirty clothes were strewn about. With the 19-year-old sitting
silently nearby, no one complained of any difficulties. All but the
youngest appeared to have found some way of making money, from working
as a maid to selling sugar cane in the market. But each keeps that
money for himself or herself, the children said. The 11-year-old
appears to survive on the generosity of the others, but it was clear
they expected her to do most of the housework. "Sometimes the laundry is difficult," the girl admitted, twisting the hem of her skirt nervously.
By 1991 the needs of the orphans in the Matero neighborhood had become
so apparent that some local women banded together to try to help. They
have registered 2,047 orphans in the neighborhood and assigned someone
to look in on each household and help solve problems that crop up. To
raise money for school fees, they make doormats, bake bread, sew and
batik fabrics. Six days a week, they also give about 60 of the
children a free meal, with the help of the local Catholic church.
So far this year the group, called Kwasha Mukwena, has promised to pay
the school fees for 279 children -- fees that range from less than $10
for the younger children to about $30 for the oldest. But they have
only raised the money to pay fees for 132.
As the lunch hour drew near recently, orphans began arriving in the
carefully swept church yard. In the back, over an open fire, the women
had made a vegetable and peanut stew to be eaten with a corn porridge.
The children, in tattered clothing, were painfully obedient. Some, as
young as five, carefully carried full plates to the room where even
the toddlers ate without spilling a drop.
A dozen children also carried plastic boxes -- a signal to the workers
that they were having a particularly hard time. Before eating, these
children put half their food in their boxes. Either they knew they
would get no supper and were saving for later, or they had been told
to bring food home for other children in the household or face
punishment. "It is not that people are so cruel," said Patricia Ngoma, who
volunteers with the program. "But they have nothing themselves."
