A Plague of Orphans and Lonely Grandmothers

Watch the video that is linked to in this piece by Kristof--it really puts a human face on the AIDS crisis in Africa....

I am also glad that Kristof mentions in the video that 90% of people who are HIV+ don't know it in Africa...



n the early years of AIDS, the virus didn't get attention because the victims were marginalized people: gays, Haitians and hemophiliacs.

Then when AIDS did threaten mainstream America, it finally evoked empathy and research dollars. But now it has slipped back in our consciousness because once more the primary victims are marginalized people — this time, Africans.

Nearly three million people die from AIDS each year. Among them are half a million children under the age of 15, mostly Africans infected during childbirth.

The numbers are numbing, even paralyzing. So for a window into southern African village life today, meet two of those African kids whose lives are being destroyed by the world's inattention to AIDS: Wandile Shongwe and his sister, Temdoline.

Wandile, an 11-year-old boy speaking shyly in front of his hut in central Swaziland, told me his story. First his mother died, and then last year his father followed, along with his older brother.

So Wandile and Temdoline, who is 9, moved in with their grandmother, but a month ago she died of AIDS. They were shuffled off to their last surviving relative, an aunt, and now she is dying as well, and is too ill to care for them.

"Nobody will take care of them after my death," said the aunt, Buduzile Ngcamphalala.

But in fact, no one is really caring for them now. The aunt was too sick to plant corn in the family plot, so there is no food. She cannot buy clothes, so Temdoline's only dress is a school uniform so tattered that it has no seat and completely shows her underwear.

To preserve even that remnant of a dress, she takes it off when she gets home from school and puts on her only other bit of clothing: a pair of shorts, with no shirt. That would be too scandalous to wear to church, so she does not go.

To live such a childhood means not only unending trauma, but also unrelenting hunger. I asked the children whether they had had breakfast that morning. No. Dinner the night before? No. The only meal they regularly get is lunch at school, provided by the World Food Program's outstanding school-feeding program (www.wfp.org).

"Every day I go to school without breakfast," Temdoline said, "and every day I go to bed without dinner."

The children gather the firewood and water, and they wash their own clothes — as well as caring for their aunt. And soon the two orphans will be left to bury their aunt and then try to survive all alone.

"I feel very painful when she is sick," Wandile said of his aunt. "Because after she dies, no one is going to take care of us." (See video of Wandile, if you dare, in my multimedia report on AIDS at www.nytimes.com/kristof.)

After traveling in southern Africa to report on AIDS, on the 25th anniversary of the detection of the virus, I feel a compulsion to share stories of people like Wandile and Temdoline. They spill out of me.

The life expectancy in Swaziland, which has the highest infection rate in the world, with nearly 40 percent of adults infected, has fallen from 55 to 34. This is a land where parents routinely bury their children, and where mothers constantly learn that they have given their babies a death sentence — the AIDS virus — during childbirth or breastfeeding.

In rural Swaziland, a 74-year-old woman named Maria Shongwe told me that 9 of her 11 children have died, along with many of her grandchildren. (It's not certain that all died of AIDS, because so few people are tested that the cause of death is not always known.) I met her as she returned from preparing the body of a 24-year-old granddaughter for a funeral.

The only comparable apocalypse in historical times was the Black Death 650 years ago. But there is a difference.

In the 14th century, we didn't know how to fight the Plague. Today we know what to do, and we have the tools to overcome AIDS — and yet we still don't use them. A $4 dose of a medicine called nevirapine mostly blocks mother-to-child transmission of H.I.V. during childbirth, and yet because of poverty and governmental incompetence, at last count only 10 percent of pregnant African women with the virus got such a drug.

Maybe that's the saddest thing of all. Twenty-five years after we allowed AIDS to spin out of control because its victims were marginalized people, we're doing the same thing all over again. And so today, as every day, another 7,900 people will die of AIDS.