Chapter 3
Box 3.1 Save the orphans

A teenager hovers self-consciously as a bar fills up in the port of Kisumu on Lake Victoria. Ill at ease, her sheepish glances from a doorway are curious in a place where women don’t care for modesty. In their endlessly languid games of pool, they put on display all that they have for sale. The nervous girl in the decent dress does not belong here. When a man beckons her over, the women she passes catch her arm, whispering advice. She’s in desperate need of some.

She should be at home with her parents, doing her homework, helping her mother care for her brothers and sisters. Only she has no parents and since her mother died she has found no other way of surviving. Her name is Evelyn. She is one of Africa’s 10 million AIDS orphans. Evelyn is perhaps 16 or 17, but pretends, when asked, that she is 20. For less than US$ 7 an hour she risks encountering the virus that killed her parents. She may risk all for twice that and copulate without a condom.

There are many Evelyns in the night-time streets of Kisumu, girls and boys, and some are very much younger. The authorities chase them from public places, but the youngsters find shelter in the slums and along Lake Victoria’s beaches. Sex remains a prime source of income. In better times, the extended family would care for an orphan but AIDS has overwhelmed traditional systems. Many families cannot cope and numbers of street children are increasing.

Agencies are responding, the Kenya Red Cross among them. By the end of 1999, it counted 1,352 orphans among the 25,000 people living within a home-based care project area. Resources are few and most are deprived of proper care, but one 28-year-old Red Cross counsellor has shown his community that something can be done. He has started an orphans-for-orphans operation.

The counsellor knows about orphans. His father died of AIDS when he was a student, obliging him as the eldest son to quit college – someone had to provide for six brothers and sisters. A few months later, AIDS claimed his mother, then an uncle and aunt. Before he knew it, he was head of a 15-child family. When the 28-year-old himself contracted HIV, another African tragedy might have had a predictable end, except that he refused to accept it. The care and support his family needed were required by many others. So he initiated income-generation projects, a revolving fund and communal care that allows all but the infants to stay in their homes – considerably changing their prospects. Life is not easy but the children involved do not drop out of school, nor do they go hungry.

Across Africa, local responses to the plight of AIDS orphans provide compelling evidence of how community-based organizations hold the answers to many problems. But response is ad hoc and poorly supported, given the dire straits faced by millions of children today and which many millions more will face in years to come as the full force of AIDS is felt. In Zimbabwe, UNAIDS forecasts, the number of AIDS orphans could rise to almost a million by 2005, from the present 600,000. “Who is going to look after these children?” asks Loveness Mupfeka, orphan coordinator for the AIDS Counselling Trust (ACT). There is no clear answer – but ACT’s call for sound and comprehensive policy is echoed elsewhere on the continent.

ACT fears ad hoc responses may be unsustainable and is nurturing community solutions. Occupied with prevention, control of infection and care for victims, ACT has 550 orphans under its wing. Says Mupfeka, “Many children now head households or are in the care of poor grandparents. Many are barely making it.” ACT is encouraging community care, forming support groups who alert them to problems and facilitating income generation. “It is important”, says Mupfeka, “that children remain in the community and in contact with their relatives.” If it can, ACT also pays school fees where a child would otherwise drop out. For without proper parenting or education, the road ahead for Africa’s orphans will be a bleak one.