December 3, 2001	Monday	Ramazan 17, 1422

JOHANNESBURG: By bicycle and car trailer, coffins are moving across Africa. They carry home the dead, encasing the bodies of men, women and children that often start to rot even before they die. On the streets, in offices, toiling in fields are the living dead, the people with the careful, disjointed walk of those whose feet have become numbed by HIV, and the concave cheeks that mark their depleted resources to fight the virus. In their wake are the millions of children who become parentless, and the parents who watch their children die before them.

But what gets forgotten among the smells and sights of illness and death is that HIV is much more than a health problem. AIDS is a social disease, and the AIDS orphans are the living proof of that.

No one knows precisely how many children in Africa have been orphaned by HIV. There are an estimated 12 million in sub-Saharan Africa. Of the 4.7m people the South African government estimates have HIV, 2.5m are thought to be women and 110,000 are defined as ‘babies’.

One leading South African researcher recently encountered a remote village of 68 souls in Malawi. The only adult was a drunken old woman, the next down in age was a 14-year-old. In Africa UNAIDS classifies a child as an orphan if he or she is under 15, and has lost either their mother or both parents. For such children the devastation of AIDS starts long before their parents are buried.

Savings of a lifetime are eroded by the futile search for a cure, and the problems are compounded when the ill person is the breadwinner.

One international agency helping to cope with the onslaught of HIV/AIDS, is British-based ActionAid. It works with local staff and partners in Africa, concentrating on mobilising community resources to help people infected with, or affected by, HIV/AIDS.

Community-based care and prevention programmes curb the spread of the virus, while opening up debate on the causes of HIV. Money-making projects and training help people with HIV to earn a living.

Families make desperate efforts to pay for school fees, books and uniforms for their children. But when the money runs out, food is more important than learning.

In the Zimbabwean village of Matoma, 15-year-old Taurai recognized in the death of his mother and illness of his father the end of his education.

Lack of money forced 16-year-old Sekai to drop out of school and look after her 11-year-old brother after her mother died in 1997, and her father followed a year later. She works in the fields and is paid about US cents 93 a day. Children of AIDS often become the carers of their parents and the impact can fall disproportionately on the girls, who are more likely to be taken out of school to perform nursing duties.

As the life of Nkosi Johnson, the 12-year-old AIDS activist schoolboy who died earlier this year shows, some women would rather abandon their child than risk their community discovering that they have HIV.

There are AIDS orphans for whom society does not have to plan in the longer term because they are unlikely to make it to the age of five. These are the children born of HIV-positive mothers.

Almost a quarter of women attending ante-natal facilities in South Africa carry the HIV virus, so each year 200,000 women risk giving birth to a child with only a 25 per cent chance of living beyond the age of two.

It is estimated that 2.3 million people will have died of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa by the end of this year. By 2009 life expectancy in South Africa will have fallen to 41 years, and 16 per cent of the population will be infected. —Dawn/The Observer News Service.