|
 Last
summer, I got a call from my friend Gretchen Dykstra, who is on the Board of
Save the Children, an organization that helps desperately poor children in
48 nations grow up healthy and educated. She invited me to travel to
southeast Africa as part of a Save the Children Advisory Committee on AIDS,
where we would witness the impact this disaster is having on children,
especially the orphans. We would then come back to our communities to tell
what we learned, to fund-raise and to advocate for more enlightened policies
and more government funds.
I
recently returned from 10 days in Malawi and Mozambique, where I visited
community-based programs for people with HIV/AIDS. The statistics in Africa
are so staggering that they are almost unbelievable. More than 25 million
Africans are now living with the HIV virus. Young people are affected
disproportionately by the pandemic; about half of those infected are under
age 25 and most are girls. In Mozambique alone, AIDS has orphaned more than
half a million children. There are villages populated only by young people
and grandparents.
Our
lives were changed by what we saw and those we met.
Our
little delegation of nine included Save staff and board members, a school
administrator, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, a NYC Commissioner and
the former president of Gay Men’s Health Crisis. We divided into three
groups each day, in order to cover as much ground as possible. We were
introduced to village chiefs, traditional healers, teachers, community
leaders who had formed committees such as Women Against Aids, health care
workers and religious leaders (representing Christians, Muslims and
traditional religions, peacefully co-existing often within the same
village).
We
saw community gardens whose profits help support the orphans. We learned
about small business co-ops where training was given to those who care for
the AIDS orphans. We met fathers with AIDS who had large families and were
close to death and HIV positive children in orphanages. Young people who had
formed Youth-to-Youth support groups entertained us with skits and songs
about how to prevent the disease through abstinence and safe sex. We were
given free samples of condoms as we left.
One
of our first stops was at a childcare center in Monkey Bay, Malawi. We were
welcomed with songs by parent volunteers and 66 toddlers, 36 of them
orphans. A community church member donated the one-room school building, but
there are no books or materials or food. And because of the failure of the
main crop, maize, the children are often too hungry to walk to school. We
asked the women what motivates them to volunteer every day and one said,
through a translator, “We support each other. You never know when you will
need help.”
The
stigma of AIDS is enormous. Everywhere, we encountered denial and rumors
about the disease. People would talk about AIDS and its impact, but no one
acknowledged having the disease or even having a friend with the virus. A
village health aide took us to the home of a man dying of AIDS; he told us
he had “TB.” He travels all day on a bus to Blantyre to wait on line for
hours for his medicine once a month. He then sleeps on the street and
travels back to his village the next day. All of his money goes toward his
anti-retroviral medicine. And he is one of the lucky ones.
A
visit to the Central Hospital in Lilongwe was one of our most
heart-wrenching experiences. We were introduced to Dr. Kazembe “the best
pediatrician in Malawi.” He laughed and said he was one of only two
pediatricians at the hospital. In this 1,000-bed hospital, probably 80
percent of the patients are HIV positive. The disease here is complicated by
malaria, pneumonia, meningitis and, above all this season, by starvation.
Everything
is in short supply: medicine (not even to ease the pain), nurses (one for
every 63 patients), doctors, even such basics as sheets. Patients sleep two
to a bed; guardians “one per patient” camp out on the floor. For the
children who are starving, all the hospital can offer is a ration of milk
every two hours. On one recent day, there were 19 deaths.
We
visited an orphanage with 137 young children run by Sister Gustavo of the
Missionaries of Charity (Mother Teresa’s order) in Maputo, Mozambique. The
facility was brand new, clean and with ample beds for the babies. The love
of the sisters for the children was obvious. It was a relief to see kids in
clean clothes enjoying popsicles. But at age 7, these children must go on to
other orphanages or back to their villages, to be cared for by some distant
relative who may already have 10 or more children in his charge.
Some
of the children will return to families that are headed by an older sibling.
We visited a family in Mozambique where a 14-year-old girl takes care of her
three brothers and sisters. The children have been on their own since 1999.
Only the oldest boy goes to school. Even when the children leave the
orphanage in good health, they often get sick when subjected to the extreme
poverty and disease of their home villages.
Tradition,
misinformation and the culture contribute to the spread of AIDS. In
initiation ceremonies when they are as young as 9 or 10, young girls are
taught to be submissive to men. They then have sex with older men in return
for money or gifts and become infected. In some villages, it is traditional
for a man to marry his brother’s widow. If the brother died of AIDS, his
widow then carries the virus back to her new partner.
It
is now estimated that 50 percent of the Malawian army is infected with the
virus; and 33 percent of the teachers and nurses. Men in Gaza Province, the
southern district of Mozambique, are finding good work in the mines of South
Africa. But they often return with the AIDS virus, infecting their wives,
who then transmit the disease to their newborn babies. As in many countries
in sub-Saharan Africa, widespread prostitution and multiple sexual partners
are common.
There
were times during my visit when I felt incredible despair. The African
landscape is breathtakingly beautiful, but the entire social fabric of these
countries is disintegrating. What can be done, and why should we care? For
humanitarian reasons, we must do whatever we can to prevent this disease and
reduce the impact on those suffering with it. But beyond that, the problems
of the developing world are our problems, too.
This
is not just a catastrophic health problem. The HIV/AIDS pandemic threatens
world security. Money from fundamentalist groups in the Middle East is
filling the void in Islamic parts of Africa —building roads, schools and
mosques in villages. As Janet Mondlane, Director of the National AIDS
Council in Mozambique, said, “We are so intertwined in this world, you
cannot escape the effects of what is going on. The day-to-day survival of a
villager depends on us and vice versa.” With 6,000 people dying of AIDS
every day in sub-Saharan Africa, we must help not just because it’s the
right thing to do, but because our future depends on it, too. |
