Grandmothers From Africa Rally for AIDS Orphans

"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."

Excerpts from Grandmothers from Africa rally for AIDS Orphans, by Lawrence K. Altman in the New York Times August 13, 2006.

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.

So he has concluded that "we must collectively carve out a social security scheme for grandmothers, which will permit them to survive themselves, and secure food, clothing and shelter for their orphan grandchildren."

Many African grandmothers, he went on, have "made that heart wrenching trek to the graveyard, many more than once, and yet they speak with a spunk and resilience that is positively supernatural."

"A burgeoning population of parentless children, adolescents and rootless youth is simply overwhelming for every state," Mr. Lewis said in the lectures he delivered at the University of Toronto last year.

The Stephen Lewis Foundation pays for 142 projects in Africa. Many work with grandmothers to help them form and expand support networks for dealing with the problems of raising AIDS orphans.

The projects also try to develop sustained income generating projects to pay for orphans' food, school fees and school uniforms, and for coffins to allow for dignified burials of family members.

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