[procaare] Re: Pre-6th HCC: Children - Infected or Affected by HIV/AIDS (2)

[ProCAARE <procaare@healthnet.org>]

[Mod note - this article fits well into our discussion on children and we cross-post it
here for members to consider.]

A Generation Orphaned by AIDS - Kenyan Children Struggle to Survive as Relatives Shun Them
or Take Advantage
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 13, 2003; Page A01
****************

EAST KAGAN, Kenya - In the dry fields of their village, Beatrice Nanjala showed her
9-year-old daughter Lily how to harvest maize and sorghum. She instructed Lily, a thin
girl with arms as willowy as the stalks in the fields, to use both hands to lift the bulky
wooden farming tool and pound the cluster of dense flowers into seeds.

She taught Lily how to build and repair mud huts. They fetched water from about two miles
away. They poured it into chunks of dirt. They churned. Slowly, her mother packed the
hulking mounds of mud onto the roof and walls.

Then, one day two months ago, when Nanjala's knees were weak, when her stomach was
swirling and her body feverish with AIDS, she showed Lily her last lesson: how to dig a
grave. Lily had seen her mother do it before. Lily's father, John, a police officer, died
of complications of the disease and was buried on a cold day in August 2001.

With the help of Lily's brothers, Phelix, 16, and Clinton, 7, they scooped the dirt out of
the red earth before sunset. The siblings buried their mother a week later.

Their sister Mary, just 17 months old and HIV-positive, sat in the dirt and grass watching
as they made a grave for a mother she would never know. Lily and her siblings are part of
the lost generation. More than 3.5 million children across sub-Saharan Africa have lost
both parents to AIDS, according to the U.N. AIDS organization, and more than 13 million
have lost at least one. Children are already going hungry because parents who were farmers
are dead.

"Economies are collapsing and famines are growing in areas that always had food," said
Aloys Nyabola Mbori, who leads a committee to find ways to feed and care for the swelling
number of orphans in East Kagan, a village in western Kenya. "Africa has seen poverty, but
this will be worse than anything we have ever known."

Families shattered

Families are breaking apart because they cannot feed all the orphaned relatives who come
to the door, desperate for help.

"Relatives have too much in their mouths to chew," said Gideon Oswago, the head
public-health officer for the African Medical and Research Foundation, an organization
based in Nairobi. Oswago cares for four orphans, along with six of his own children. "It's
reached the point where if you see an orphan coming, it's a huge burden," he said.

There is also concern among health and education workers that a generation growing up
without parental guidance will worsen political instability on a continent already
struggling to overcome terrorism and civil and ethnic strife. Rebel groups have tapped
into the vulnerable orphan populations by enticing abandoned children to earn money, food
and respect with guns - leading to more chaos and increasing the chances of rape and HIV
transmission.

When the disease first came to East Kagan, it was called "the slim," meaning a curse
causing dramatic weight loss. But now, as the population of orphans has ballooned, the
villagers and many like them across East Africa call the AIDS pandemic "the disaster."

Lily followed the lessons her mother had taught her before she died with the discipline
that she once used to copy the alphabet into her notebook at school.

But a week after her mother's death, Lily stopped going to classes. She had to care for
young Mary, who was suffering from blotchy skin rashes, fevers and constant vomiting.

The next month, Lily and her brothers, who do not have HIV, dug a grave for little Mary.
She died on a cloudy afternoon.

A day in Lily's life

"I was sad. I couldn't stop crying," mumbled Lily one recent day, as she pounded mud and
smeared the cracks in their hut. Lily was left in charge of the house when Phelix traveled
15 miles to the nearest town, Homa Bay, to work in a shack restaurant.

On this day, she woke before the sun rose. She scrambled off her foam mattress. In the
cold morning air, she walked in a long shredded T-shirt to the water pump and balanced an
eight-pound jug atop her head. She went to the fields. She picked sorghum. She tried to
pound the buds into seeds. It was like watching a toddler try to wield a hammer.

In the afternoon, a Kenyan nurse, Helen Kelly, known here as Mama Kelly, came for a visit.
She works with the research foundation, and she travels several hours every day on a
cratered road to help orphans with counseling, school fees and health care.

"Slowly, slowly," Kelly said gently in Swahili to Lily. "Lily is such a good girl." She
smoothed her hand over Lily's back and then walked away. She folded into tears.

"What is happening to Africa?" she lamented. "The next Nelson Mandela could be here and we
would never know, we would never see the orphans reach their potential."

In the Luo culture, the second-biggest ethnic group in Kenya, there is no bigger event
than a funeral feast. To honor the life of the dead, relatives, friends and just hungry
people often travel long distances to attend.

The funerals are often larger than weddings and involve an ample feast, at the expense of
the family's few animals and meager savings. The tradition has become a new burden for
AIDS orphans: When the relatives and friends go home, the orphans are left with nothing to
eat.

In Africa, where a cow or a flock of chickens is as good as money in the bank, they are
left with nothing to sell. They don't even have eggs or milk after their animals are
killed.

In the case of Castrol Videli Omondei, 13, and his sister Molly, 11, the feasting began as
soon as their mother was buried. First, three cows were slaughtered. Then, relatives
killed 20 chickens and four rams. The children's mother, Helon Akoth, had requested that
such an expensive ceremony be delayed. Their father was also dying, and she wanted her
children to save money.

But no one listened.

Almost everyone at Akoth's October funeral ate until their bellies hurt, but not Castrol
and Molly. Instead, they watched their father, Issaiah Lieta, who was asleep, exhausted
from his latest bout with diarrhea, a side effect of AIDS.

"I was worried about money, and the animals were all being eaten," Castrol recalled. The
feast cost the equivalent of $300, about what the family makes in a year.

His father, 40 and a welder, died the next month. A second feast was planned, this time
with the remaining cow and dozen chickens. In the end, Mama Kelly recalled, nearly two
years' worth of food and money for school uniforms and books was lost.

The orphans are left now with one bag of groundnuts. Molly is literally starving and
complains to her teachers of headaches. A similar chain of funerals and feasts happened in
Lily's family.

She has taken to eating grass.

After the funerals, Castrol and Molly decided to redecorate their dark, one-room hut. He
handed white chalk to Molly. She drew on the clay-colored walls for hours. It was a
playful act. And it was something they were not allowed to do when their parents were
alive. They sketched pictures of flowers and math problems from textbooks and phrases from
Bible workbooks to keep them company.

The hut is empty. Their uncle admits he took all of their furniture, including their foam
mattresses. He said he is keeping the furniture to protect it from being stolen. In some
African tribes, the brother of the husband inherits everything when the male head of a
household dies. Sometimes, even the wife is inherited for marriage.

For orphans, keeping their land is the key to avoiding a life of begging, crime or
prostitution on the streets, and ensures a minimum level of health, Kelly said. At the
village health post, a nurse reports increasing cases of malaria, scabies, bronchitis,
lice, sexual disease and early pregnancy in girls as young as 12 after parents die and
food and shelter disappear. A 1981 law allows children to inherit their parents' property.
They can use lawyers to reclaim anything that has been taken away. But in rural areas,
people do not know they can bring cases to court.

Phelix was so worried about distant relatives coming and taking their property that he
took a job at the Star Light Hotel, the dank restaurant in Homa Bay. He earns less than 20
cents a day and tries to save as much as he can in case his family is forced to move. Some
friends in the town have turned to sex with men to earn their daily bread. Others leave
for Nairobi. Sometimes Phelix feels overwhelmed and wants to leave and learn a trade. But
he stays, helping in the fields when he can.

"If I left, what would they eat? I can't leave them," he explained, softly. Then he looked
down and said: "I am too proud of Lily and Clinton. I love them."

Molly grabbed a photo of her mother on a recent day and headed to school. She keeps it in
her pocket. She has decided to keep showing up at Opinde Primary School, about a 45-minute
walk away, even though she has no shoes, no breakfast and no uniform. The lack of a
uniform irks her the most. Her friends all have dark blue dresses and even cute red, blue
and orange yarn school bags. She carries her notebook in a plastic bag.

"I am feeling really bad," she said as she trudged off to school. "I don't look smart."

Falling behind

But what bothers her teachers is something far more basic: food. Free primary education
began this year across Kenya, but lunch remains a dream. Charles Otieno, the headmaster,
says 100 students out of 400 in his school are orphans, making learning almost impossible.

He said that after Molly's mother died, she stopped cleaning herself. Her grades fell. She
stopped talking in class and hides in a corner. A teacher comes by and tells Molly that
she is very brave and will be OK. Molly just frowns and turns away. She has started
missing school.

When Castrol shows up, he falls asleep. Before his parents died, he was at the top of his
class.

"It's sad and very common," Otieno told teachers gathered for a meeting about the growing
number of orphaned students.

The school has started more lessons on farming, so that orphans can at least grow their
own food. Otieno is also considering teaching personal hygiene. And maybe hanging up
photos of the parents would be a good idea, he said. Either way, he needs a way to bring
the students back to class.

Phelix, Lily and Clinton don't show up at school anymore. They are all too busy in the
fields.

Copyright (C) 2003 The Washington Post Company
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