Children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic are rightly the focus of much attention on Universal Children's Day. However youngsters in AIDS-affected households become vulnerable long before their parents die. Memory projects can provide an effective means of bringing children and parents together to share family memories and plan for the future.
In severely-affected communities, the HIV/AIDS epidemic affects all aspects of community life and in AIDS-affected families, the children become vulnerable in many ways. All too frequently, increased poverty, poor nutrition and inadequate health care accompany the advent of HIV/AIDS into the household.
Children often have to drop out of school as they become the principal care givers for their sick parents and younger siblings. The stigma and discrimination associated with HIV/AIDS in many parts of the world increases the impact of the epidemic on affected individuals and their families. Children too are often stigmatised when their parents are sick or have died as a result of AIDS.
Recognising the vulnerability of children in households affected by HIV/AIDS, the Zimbabwe Red Cross Society decided to launch a memory project. The concept is simple - by means of the creation of a memory book or memory box, parents who are living with HIV/AIDS are empowered to communicate with their children, who in turn are helped to learn more about their family heritage and feel more hopeful and secure about their future, so that if the parents do die, they have a sense of identity and belonging.
Memory books and boxes provide information about the parents, the family history, stories about the parents and the child, photographs, drawings, special family memories - they are a treasure chest of family information.
The Zimbabwe Red Cross recently held a five-day practical memory workshop at the Red Cross national training centre in Harare. The participants were mostly care facilitators from the already well-established Zimbabwe Red Cross home care programme. These volunteers work with people living with HIV/AIDS in their community and they know the families and children well. The participants started to create their own memory books and boxes, using local materials, and it proved to be a powerful and revealing experience.
The volunteers have now returned to their communities and are working with the Red Cross support groups for people living with HIV/AIDS to put the memory project into practice. Although the main aim of the memory books is not to reveal the parents' health status, when parents and children work together on creating the memory books it does provide an opportunity for parents to disclose their health status if they so wish, and to answer their children's questions.
They can also participate in discussions about who will care for them when their parents die. At the same time this provides a practical way of promoting prevention awareness and fighting stigma and discrimination.
The Red Cross volunteers are also working with a group of caregivers of children who are already orphans, mainly grandparents who are the repositories of family memories and who can provide the children with that crucially important feeling of belonging.
There are already more than 13 million children who have lost their parents to HIV/AIDS and millions more who have been made vulnerable. But we must not allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the staggering statistics. The children need help now. The Zimbabwe Red Cross is helping to provide some of these vulnerable children with that vital ingredient - hope for the future.
Universal Children's Day marks the adoption by the UN General Assembly on 20 November 1989 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Jennifer Inger is Senior Officer, Social Welfare at the International Federation
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