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The Children -- First Reflections on the 2002 Southern Africa Trip
By Peggy Dulany

Somehow, when you hear the statistics of AIDS prevalence (up to 25% infection rate in South Africa, 12-13% in Mozambique), it doesn't sink in. It is seeing, touching the children whose lives have been affected, by having it themselves, by losing their parents to it, or by having been abused by desperate men seeking protection against or cure from the dread disease by having sex with virgins (including infants). Then the meaning reaches you like a two-by-four upside your head.

Bongi

Our luxury bus pulls up next to a larger than normal house in a small township near Khayalitscha, Capetown. All 18 of us troop inside and are immediately stampeded by children stretching out their arms to be picked up. My little bundle is Bongi, who looks three but is probably five. He clings to me. I ask him to take me on a tour around the house, which is mostly rooms filled with double-decker beds - about 30 of them. "Which one is your bed?" I ask. He points vaguely, smiles and nestles his head into my neck.

Amelia, who runs "Amelia's House", has taken in over one hundred children from infants up to 16 years old. The infants are in another house because they need special care. These children range from two or three to sixteen or eighteen, the older ones taking care of the younger ones. The amazing thing is that the house is full of love. The children -- one little boy missing an eye and with whitish medication on several places on his head -- are clean and, with the exception of trying to push each other out of the way to climb on one of our laps, treat each other well.

I find myself unable to pay attention to what is being said about the house, so totally engrossed I am with Bongi and the ten or so other children who, during the course of our half-hour stay, take my hand or crawl into my lap.

Helen Lieberman, who founded Ikala Libontu many years ago, and who is supported by GPC members, Gaynor and Johann Rupert, has been finding support for well over 100 such homes, as the number of AIDS orphans and abused children increase. We ask her if Amelia and her home are different from the others. "No", she says. "We chose this one because it was on the way to the dinner."

Bongi has gotten off my lap and disappears into the throng of children. We are told we must get back on the bus. The older children follow us outside, some of them coming onto the bus by our invitation to have a look, and then politely filing off. "When are you coming back?" They ask. They wave and wave outside the window. I cry from my gut.

Simon and Sipho

We are in Soweto visiting a Salvation Army site for abused and HIV/AIDS infected children. It is financed by the Salvation Army from Norway and by the Nelson Mandela Children's Foundation. A large complex, it encompasses a well-built and well-equipped pre-school, playground, meeting room, and dormitories for the older children and staff.

We are divided up into groups to tour the facilities. While waiting to go, I step backwards and, before putting my full weight down, feel something soft under my foot. I lurch forward and look behind me. It is a small child's foot I was about to step on. "Oh, I'm so sorry, are you all right?" I ask. The solemn little face shows no change in expression as he lifts up his arms for me to pick him up. He doesn't answer, nor does he cry.

"Where did he come from?" I ask, as there are no other children right around us. "Oh, he must have come from the preschool over there," someone answers, directing my attention to an open playground about 100 yards away. Thinking I should take him back before we go on the tour, I walk with him to the group. He tightens his grip around my neck when I try to put him down. "You want to come with us?" I ask, not expecting a response, as he hasn't changed expression or said a word to anything else I have said. The slightest nod convinces me.

I get the first sign of life and hope in this tiny child when we go into the older girls' dormitory and see stuffed animals on the bed. We take the liberty of sitting on the bed to check them out. The largest one -- his size -- is a dog-eared rabbit. "Bunny!" he says, to my surprise. He also echoes "Bear" and "Doggie", and smiles a bit as he reaches for them. He doesn't try to take any of them though.

We go on to the pre-school, where I again erroneously think I'll leave him, and he laughs out loud when he sees GPC member Adele Simmons playing ball with an even smaller child. His face is transformed. He won't get down to play though. "Why won't you tell me your name?" I ask. No response. "Oh, that's Simon," one of the caretakers tells me. And Synergos staff member, Andrea Rogers, tells me that she met him the day before when she came to visit the place. He evidently adopts visitors on a regular basis.

"I want to go on the bus," Simon tells me, out of the blue, and then repeats regularly during our tour. I haven't seen our bus for a while and tell him we'll go on it when it comes back. Finally, we find it and he smiles hugely as we go up the steps. For the first time, he is willing to get down out of my arms, and runs from seat to seat, climbing on each to look out the window. He laughs out loud when he sees some older children and waves to them. We find a bottle of water and he drinks most of it down. It occurs to me he might need to go to the toilet, so we go into the small bathroom and he immediately pulls out his penis. He doesn't reach the toilet, though, so I stand him on top of it and he aims perfectly.

We're being called to lunch and an older youth performance to raise awareness about AIDS. I sit at one of the small tables, first with Simon on my lap, sharing my lunch with him and another child, Sipho, who materializes with a small herd of other preschool children. Pretty soon Simon gets off my lap and sits in his own chair, munching contentedly.

Sipho, who tells me his own name, climbs on. The most noticeable thing about him is a large scar that runs from above one ear over the top of his head to the other ear. What terrible thing could have happened to him I can't even imagine. He is hungry and thirsty, though, and manages to eat half a sandwich and drink the part of his orange juice that he does not dribble on my pants.

I am holding him when the older children start their performance. At some point, one of them shouts at another and he jumps, turning sideways. I sense his terror and put my hand over his heart, which is pounding furiously. Where else has this happened to him with worse consequences than just shouting?

Again, we have to leave. I hug Sipho and set him down on my chair. Simon won't say goodbye and makes no move to come get on the bus with me. His face has returned to stone.

Ana

We're again divided into groups, this time in Maputo, Mozambique. Our group is going to see some community-based care programs started by women who had started discovering child-headed households where both parents had died of AIDS, and were contributing their own resources on a monthly basis to pay the rent on a small building that housed the activist staff members and held a few medicines, as well as to buy food for these families.

After watching an art class for about fifty small children, where leading Mozambican artist, Naguib, is showing children how to draw pictures in the sand and add bits of pebbles and straw for definition, we are taken to Ana's house.

Ana, lovely and fifteen years old, is standing outside a two-room mud house when we arrive. She answers our questions willingly. She is one of six children and the head of the household. When she tells the ages, from eighteen to six, I ask why she is the head of the household. It is because her 18- and 17-year-old brothers have mental disabilities and can't help. In fact, she has to take care of them too.

We ask if we can go inside and she acquiesces, apologizing that it is messy. She says they had cleaned up that morning, but her brothers messed it up again. Not that there is much to mess up. There is no furniture in either room except for a broken bedstead in the corner. The room she says her brothers stay in smells strongly of urine. One of her brothers wets his "bed", she explains.

Outside, a sleeping mat of woven straw is propped up against the plants that divide her plot from the next one. A rickety table holds a single metal pot and a couple of plates and utensils. Ana says she cooks inside (there is no chimney) and, when I ask if the smoke doesn't bother them, she says she sends them outside while she's cooking. We tour the two fruit trees that grow outside the house.

Her siblings are not there. The younger ones are in school and the older boys are somewhere in the neighborhood. Her father died some years ago and her mother last year. I ask if she is still missing her mother a lot. "Yes, we miss her," she says, "but the aunties [meaning the women of the program "Reencontro"] console us. They bring us food".

We invite Ana to come with us to visit the community radio station where the broadcaster is reading off messages from people needing to get in touch with their family members somewhere else in this city without easy transport and mostly without phones. The rest of the time, the broadcaster was playing music or reading the news stories that the young reporters were taking turns writing up for her on the single computer. The program was funded by Oxfam for two years, but would run out of its $59,000 grant by the end of December. Ana has never been here before and listens shyly to the conversation.

We are told she can't come with us to the next site -- a public high school with a series of programs to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS -- so we have to say good-bye to her. I hug her and, wiping some grains of sand off her shoulder, tell her that some day her little siblings will be grown up and she won't have to take care of them, that she should stay in school and then she can have a job and have her own life. She smiles and hugs me back.

The question is, will other relatives take over her house, as is often the custom? Will she herself become infected with AIDS? Will there in fact be a job for her if she finishes school? She may actually be one of the lucky ones, in relative terms, as she has been found by the dedicated women of Reencontro. And Reencontro may be more fortunate than many other community-based efforts to keep up with the growing AIDS orphans problem, in that the founders are middle-class, mostly professional women who have access to groups like our host, the Community Development Foundation (FDC) which, in turn gets funding from groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the McCaw Foundation and USAID. These linkages are there or our group wouldn't have gotten to visit Ana. But this is Maputo, the capital city. What about more isolated communities all over the country and all over Southern Africa?

Depressing as this thought is, though, there is one incredibly strong thing going for these children. That is the sense of inclusiveness among families here. As some one said to us, families simply expand to meet the needs. They can always take in one more. When there is no adult family left, women like those of Reencontro materialize and do what they can to meet the need. Since the need is only going to grow, though, this is why FDC has made this a major priority. And this is why we at Synergos have been talking with them and over 300 other concerned groups in the region to explore the idea of a regional fund which would try to attract major funding to build capacity and provide funding for just such community-based programs working on both prevention and care.

As I sit here writing on the airplane ride home from Maputo, I am heartened at the progress that has been made in this region of the world, and ever conscious of how much more there is to do. -- Peggy, April 8, 2002