Marko Kokic and John Sparrow
The orphans’ crime had been that they were hungry. For much of the day they had laboured at a well, a slight 12-year-old boy and his younger sister drawing water for villagers in the Berea district of Lesotho. They were paid in food for their services.
At home the youngsters, who had lost their parents to AIDS, waited for their uncle, a guardian who cared little for them and vented his displeasure in ill-treatment. The man was often away, drinking with his cronies, but the children were forbidden to eat unless he was present at the table.
As the hours passed their hunger increased and eventually they ate from the day’s food takings. When the uncle returned, drunk as usual, and discovered the misdemeanour he beat the children savagely.
Such tales are common in southern Africa, where 3.2 million children orphaned by AIDS bring a new definition to the term “most vulnerable”.
As well as the trauma and poverty the loss of parents brings, abuse and exploitation are increasingly disturbing problems. Red Cross National Societies report that without the protection of parents, cruelty, food for sex, cheap or forced child labour, child rape and even coerced commercial sex are blighting the lives of more and more young people.
But abuse can be countered. Mother of three Mahlompho Moshoeshoe, a Lesotho Red Cross home-care volunteer in Berea reported the case of the abusive uncle to the local chief and saw to it that he received a warning: desist or face prosecution. The beatings have ended, as has the labour at the well. Red Cross food now keeps the children fed, and a close Red Cross eye is kept upon them.
Given the scale of the problem, however, such ad hoc action is not enough.
The Lesotho Red Cross already provides food, clothing and school fees for some needy children, but come August it will start an integrated community home-based care programme providing structured support to orphans.
Backed by the German Red Cross, the International Federation and the European Commission’s Humanitarian Office (ECHO), the programme will aim to improve the quality of life for people living with HIV/AIDS or chronic illness, and those affected by it, families, carers and orphans in the western districts of Berea, Leribe and Mafeteng.
Mahlompho Moshoeshoe will be one of 120 home-based care facilitators in a network reaching 6,000 households in Berea and Leribe. Trained in HIV/AIDS prevention, basic nursing care, counselling to ease stress, the rights of orphans and people living with HIV/AIDS, legal issues and community mobilization, they in turn will train others and directly reach affected families. Community response to the AIDS pandemic and its consequences will be strengthened.
The desperate need of many orphans was revealed by a Lesotho Red Cross survey in which 79 per cent of the children reported no community support at all. Only 11 per cent were being helped with food, less than 3 per cent with clothes and school fees, and less than 2 per cent with medical costs. Most important to the children was education. Help to pay school fees topped their list of priorities, ahead of food and clothes.
The survey also found half the children that were visited to be in poor health. Some 36 per cent were considered to be in fair health and only five per cent in good health.
Mahlompho sees the new programme helping to pre-empt orphans’ problems as well as solving them. The effects of their parents’ illness are felt long before children are orphaned. “Many stop their schooling once their parents are too sick to work,” she says, “sometimes because there isn’t the money for school fees, but also because the children are needed at home to care for the sick, to do the household chores or to help on the land.”
As poverty grows, so too does the danger of youngsters being led into commercial sex to pay for life’s essentials. Others are simply neglected.
The home-based care programme will allow the Red Cross to intervene earlier, lifting the burden from the young and assuring their education. It will help those left to care for orphans, often elderly grandparents who themselves need support. AIDS has robbed them, too, of the family care their dead children would have given them.
Malibako Hoala is one of them. A daughter died a year ago and she cares for four grandchildren in Mahlompho Moshoeshoe’s home village. A second daughter is now chronically ill at home. Malibako is a caring and resourceful grandmother who brews sorghum beer to support the family while the Lesotho Red Cross helps with school fees and food assistance.
The apple of Malibako’s eye is 14-year-old Maseabata, a good scholar who has already made her way into high school. With hard work she could have a bright future but her grandmother is aware of the dangers, of how fragile that future could be if the girl were left to her own devices. The number of child-headed households is growing rapidly.
The limitations of age bother the old lady. Her ailing daughter returned from a job in South Africa a week ago. Ill for two months, she had nowhere else to turn to. Malibako does her best but undoubtedly the nursing will take its toll upon her.
The Red Cross worker looks in daily. More help is coming, she tells her.
Related links:
Southern Africa food crisis
Reducing the impact of HIV/AIDS
Lesotho photo gallery