Grandmothers Rally to Raise AIDS Orphans - New York Times

Grandmothers Rally to Raise AIDS Orphans - New York Times: "TORONTO, Aug. 12 — After burying their children, they must take care of the children of their children.

They are the “AIDS grannies” of Africa: women like Matilda Mwenda, 51, of Zambia, who has lost two of her seven children to AIDS, leaving five orphaned grandchildren in her care, along with two nieces who were orphaned when her sister died of AIDS."
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The pandemic has created an estimated 12 million orphans in Africa, with the number expected to grow to 18 million by 2010. The burden of care has fallen on grandmothers, whose extended families often exceed a dozen children.
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“Governments haven’t the faintest idea what to do,” said Stephen Lewis, a former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations who is Secretary General Kofi Annan’s representative to Africa for AIDS.

“The policies for orphans, more often than not, are a grab bag of frantic interventions, where faith-based and community-based groups try desperately to cope with the numbers, but rarely have either the capacity or the resources,” he said.

His nonprofit Stephen Lewis Foundation (stephenlewisfoundation.org) sponsored the gathering here. As the foundation prepared for the gathering, it learned that a small number of Canadian grandmothers had established connections with grandmothers in Africa, particularly a group called the Go Go Grannies in Alexandria Township near Johannesburg.
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Twenty-five years after AIDS was first detected, no master plan exists to deal with its orphans.

“What the world fails to recognize is that these children don’t become orphans when their parents die, they become orphans while their parents are dying,” said Mr. Lewis, the United Nations representative.

In the absence of a grandmother or other relative to care for AIDS orphans, the oldest child becomes the head of the household and looks after the siblings.

“Many orphans play, beg for food and sleep on the streets,” Ms. Matimuna said. Some go naked for lack of clothes. As the orphans grow up, some commit crimes. Some become prostitutes, get pregnant and are infected with H.I.V.

The transfer of love, knowledge and values from one generation to the other is gone, and with it goes the confidence, security and sense of place that children normally take for granted, Mr. Lewis said.