"In an era when AIDS is claiming about 2.3 million lives a year in sub-Saharan Africa - roughly 80,000 people last year in Malawi alone - disease and stubborn tradition have combined in a terrible synergy, robbing countless mothers and children not only of their loved ones but of everything they own. "....
"I don't have a permanent place to stay," he wrote in a notebook provided to him by Unicef, which endeavors to track and aid orphans like Chikumbutso. "I am shifted from one place to another, sometimes on a weekly basis. Assistance which I need: food, clothes, blankets, school uniform."
He is at least marginally better off than his 14-year-old sister, Labbecca. A few weeks ago she turned up on the doorstep of his aunt, Befiya Phaelemwe, begging to be taken in.
But the aunt said the pittance her husband earned patching clothes was not enough to feed her own children and Chikumbutso. She gestured toward a metal bucket half-filled with corn on the floor - the sum total, she said, of the family's provisions.
"I told her the house was small and I could not take one more child," she said. "She was full of sorrow."
In tears, Labbecca trudged off, saying maybe a boyfriend would provide her with a place to sleep. Ms. Phaelemwe said she had not seen her since and had no idea where she was.
Said Chikumbutso: "I am very worried."
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