A Generation Orphaned by AIDS Kenyan Children Struggle to Survive As Relatives Shun Them

A Generation Orphaned by AIDS
Kenyan Children Struggle to Survive as Relatives Shun Them or Take Advantage

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 13, 2003; Page A01

EAST KAGAN, Kenya -- In the dry fields of their village, Beatrice Nanjala showed her 9-year-old daughter Lily how to harvest maize and sorghum. She instructed Lily, a thin girl with arms as willowy as the stalks in the fields, to use both hands to lift the bulky wooden farming tool and pound the cluster of dense flowers into seeds.

She taught Lily how to build and repair mud huts. They fetched water from about two miles away. They poured it into chunks of dirt. They churned. Slowly, her mother packed the hulking mounds of mud onto the roof and walls.

Then, one day two months ago, when Nanjala's knees were weak, when her stomach was swirling and her body feverish with AIDS, she showed Lily her last lesson: how to dig a grave. Lily had seen her mother do it before. Lily's father, John, a police officer, died of complications of the disease and was buried on a cold day in August 2001.

With the help of Lily's brothers, Phelix, 16, and Clinton, 7, they scooped the dirt out of the red earth before sunset.

The siblings buried their mother a week later.

Their sister Mary, just 17 months old and HIV-positive, sat in the dirt and grass watching as they made a grave for a mother she would never know.

Lily and her siblings are part of the lost generation. More than 3.5 million children across sub-Saharan Africa have lost both parents to AIDS, according to the U.N. AIDS organization, and more than 13 million have lost at least one.

Children are already going hungry because parents who were farmers are dead.

"Economies are collapsing and famines are growing in areas that always had food," said Aloys Nyabola Mbori, who leads a committee to find ways to feed and care for the swelling number of orphans in East Kagan, a village in western Kenya that is a day's drive from Nairobi, the capital. "Africa has seen poverty, but this will be worse than anything we have ever known."

Families are breaking apart because they cannot feed all of the orphaned relatives who come to the door, desperate for help.

"Relatives have too much in their mouths to chew," said Gideon Oswago, the head public health officer for the African Medical and Research Foundation, an organization based in Nairobi. Oswago cares for four orphans, along with six of his own children. "It's reached the point where if you see an orphan coming, it's a huge burden," he said.

There is also concern among health and education workers that a generation growing up without parental guidance will worsen political instability on a continent already struggling to overcome terrorism and civil and ethnic strife. Rebel groups have tapped into the vulnerable orphan populations by enticing abandoned children to earn money, food and respect with guns -- leading to more chaos and increasing the chances of rape and HIV transmission.

"The implications of this are monstrous. The profound trauma of losing a mother or both parents has devastating long-term implications, not only for a child's well-being and development, but for the stability of communities and, ultimately, nations themselves," said Carol Bellamy, executive director of the U.N. Children's Fund. "Children and women caught up in the chaos and forced displacement of war are more vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation, which facilitates the spread of HIV."

In Nairobi, orphaned boys wander the streets barefoot and dirty, many sniffing glue. Crusted white layers are stuck to their nostrils. They are known across the continent as "glue boys," and some fall into committing petty crimes like stealing cell phones and wallets, aid workers report, mostly because they have no other way to survive.

When the disease first came to East Kagan, it was called "the slim," meaning a curse causing dramatic weight loss. But now, as the population of orphans has ballooned, the villagers and many like them across East Africa call the AIDS pandemic "the disaster."

A Grave for Mary
Lily followed the lessons her mother had taught her before she died with the discipline that she once used to copy the alphabet into her notebook at school.

But a week after her mother's death, Lily stopped going to classes. She had to care for young Mary, who was suffering from blotchy skin rashes, fevers and constant vomiting.

The next month, Lily and her brothers, who do not have HIV, dug a grave for little Mary. She died on a cloudy afternoon.

"I was sad. I couldn't stop crying," mumbled Lily one recent day, as she pounded mud and smeared the cracks in their hut. Lily was left in charge of the house when Phelix traveled 15 miles to the nearest town, Homa Bay, to work in a shack restaurant.

On this day, she woke before the sun rose. She scrambled off of her foam mattress. In the cold morning air, she walked in a long shredded T-shirt to the water pump and balanced an eight-pound jug atop her head. She went to the fields. She picked sorghum. She tried to pound the buds into seeds. It was like watching a toddler try to wield a hammer.

In the afternoon, a Kenyan nurse, Helen Kelly, known here as Mama Kelly, came for a visit. She works with the research foundation, and she travels several hours every day on a cratered road to help orphans with counseling, school fees and health care.

"Slowly, slowly," Kelly said gently in Swahili to Lily. "Lily is such a good girl." She smoothed her hand over Lily's back and then walked away. She folded into tears.

"What is happening to Africa?" she lamented. "The next Nelson Mandela could be here and we would never know, we would never see the orphans reach their potential."

Strained Family Ties
In East Kagan, a sprawling village of 3,000, one in every three people has the disease and there are more than 400 orphans, many struggling to survive on their own. Tucked into a trail of knobby grass and mud footpaths, the village is made up largely of the Luo tribe, the second-biggest ethnic group in Kenya.

The village is in one of Kenya's poorest districts. Mud huts with thatched roofs sit in clusters of three or four in the scrappy, flat fields. Small sprouts of wilting maize cover fields that are gray and dry from the hot sun and lack of rain.

A few men herd cattle. A few children lead donkeys to carry water and firewood. Like many rural communities in Africa, the village has no cars, no electricity and no running water.

Parents who are dying of AIDS linger at the village's one-room health clinic, looking weak and begging for aspirin to ease their pain. No one here can afford the life-saving drugs available in the West.

Parents are dying so quickly that they don't have time to ask relatives if they can take in their children. Fights have broken out in the village over which family will care for which orphans.

Children run around barefoot, kicking balls made from plastic bags and rubber bands. The mzees -- Swahili for elders -- walk with sticks through the village with creased faces and hunched bodies.

The lack of a middle generation is startling. Small dirt mounds -- graves of parents -- can be seen on the grounds of huts throughout the village. Lily's neighbors are orphans, too. And they seem even more baffled by their new situation.

The eldest of the neighboring family is Castrol Videli Omondei. He is 13. He stands perfectly straight, even as his ribs protrude from his chest. He cares for his sister, Molly, who is 11. She nursed her mother when she was sick and now seems haunted by the experience.

Molly wears a torn pink shirt and a blue skirt and rarely smiles.

Her uncle, John Okuoga Niyare, has offered to help, but admits that he gives priority to his own children.

He stuffs Molly and Castrol into his overcrowded hut when they are afraid to sleep alone.

Recently, he has been so low on cash that he has started farming their land, too, and taking the crops.

At lunch, Molly gets only groundnuts, while her cousin dines on fish. She stares at her cousin's plate but becomes so frustrated that she leaves the hut.

"I am ashamed, but it's true," Niyare said, lowering his eyes. "We are trying. I just don't know what to do."

Other orphans have family members who have completely abandoned them, a phenomenon that was unusual in Africa before AIDS.

Lily has an aunt. But the last time she saw her was at Mary's funeral. The aunt then took away another brother, Mark, 12, to do farm work because he appeared the strongest.

She hasn't been back since. She already has four children of her own, plus five orphans from her husband's side of the family.

A Feast of Burden
In the Luo culture, there is no bigger event than a funeral feast. To honor the life of the dead, relatives, friends and just hungry people often travel long distances to attend.

The funerals are often larger than weddings and involve an ample feast, at the expense of the family's few animals and meager savings. The tradition has become a new burden for AIDS orphans: When the relatives and friends go home, the orphans are left with nothing to eat.

In Africa, where a cow or a flock of chickens is as good as money in the bank, they are left with nothing to sell. They don't even have eggs or milk after their animals are killed.

In the case of Castrol and Molly, the feasting began as soon as their mother's body was put into the earth. First, three cows were slaughtered. Then, relatives killed 20 chickens and four rams. The children's mother, Helon Akoth, had requested that such an expensive ceremony be delayed. Their father was also dying, and she wanted her children to save money.

But no one listened.

Instead, relatives feasted on the roasted meats along with plates of sukumawki, or boiled green leaves, hunks of ugali, or mashed maize, and stacks of chapatti bread, as well as rice, mangoes, pineapples and sweet potatoes. To drink, there was a very expensive treat: creamy cups of thick ground nuts blended with lime and milk, forming a thick shake. Local alcoholic brews also flowed.

Almost everyone at Akoth's October funeral ate until their bellies hurt, even those who work in Nairobi and rarely feel the kind of bone hunger that rural villagers experience.

But Castrol and Molly didn't feast.

Instead they watched their father, Issaiah Lieta, who was asleep, exhausted from his latest bout with diarrhea, a side effect of AIDS.

"I was worried about money, and the animals were all being eaten," Castrol recalled. The feast cost the equivalent of $300, about what the family makes in a year.

His father, 40 and a welder, died the next month. A second feast was planned, this time with the remaining cow and dozen chickens. In the end, Mama Kelly recalled, nearly two years' worth of food and money for school uniforms and books was lost.

The orphans are left now with one bag of groundnuts. Molly is literally starving and complains to her teachers of headaches.

A similar chain of funerals and feasts happened in Lily's family.

She has taken to eating grass.

Home Is an Empty Hut
After the funerals, Castrol and Molly decided to redecorate their dark, one-room hut. He handed white chalk to Molly. She drew on the clay-colored walls for hours.

It was a playful act. And it was something they were not allowed to do when their parents were alive.

They sketched pictures of flowers and math problems from textbooks and phrases from Bible workbooks to keep them company.

"Where is Jesus?" one chalked statement in young handwriting asks.

"Where is the land of Canaan?" another pleads.

The hut is empty. Their uncle admits that he took all of their furniture, including their foam mattresses.

He said he is keeping the furniture to protect it from being stolen. In some African tribes, the brother of the husband inherits everything when the male head of a household dies. Land. Cows. Small farms. Sometimes, even the wife is inherited for marriage.

For orphans, keeping their land is the key to avoiding a life of begging, crime or prostitution on the streets, and ensures a minimum level of health, Kelly said.

Inside the village health post, a nurse reports increasing cases of malaria, scabies, bronchitis, lice, sexual disease and early pregnancy in girls as young as 12 after parents die and food and shelter disappear.

A law passed in 1981 in Kenya allows children to inherit their parents' property. They can use lawyers to reclaim anything that has been taken away. But in rural areas, people do not know they can bring cases to court.

Phelix was so worried about distant relatives coming and taking their property that he took a job at the Star Light Hotel, the dank restaurant in Homa Bay. He earns less than 20 cents a day and tries to save as much as he can in case his family is forced to move. Some friends in the town have turned to sex with men to earn their daily bread. Others leave for Nairobi. Sometimes Phelix feels overwhelmed and wants to leave and learn a trade. But he stays, helping in the fields when he can.

"If I left, what would they eat? I can't leave them," he explained, softly. Then he looked down and said: "I am too proud of Lily and Clinton. I love them."

Going to School Hungry
Molly grabbed a photo of her mother on a recent day and headed off to school. She keeps it in her pocket. She has decided to keep showing up at Opinde Primary School, about a 45-minute walk away, even though she has no shoes, no breakfast and no uniform.

The lack of a uniform irks her the most. Her friends all have dark blue dresses and even cute red, blue and orange yarn school bags. She carries her notebook in a plastic bag.

"I am feeling really bad," she said as she trudged off to school. "I don't look smart."

But what bothers her teachers is something far more basic: food. Free primary education began this year across Kenya, but lunch remains a dream.

Sitting inside a room with chipped paint on the walls, Charles Otieno, the headmaster, reports that 100 students out of 400 in his school are orphans, and this has made learning almost impossible.

He said that after Molly's mother died, she stopped cleaning herself. Her grades fell. She stopped talking in class and hides in a corner as others sing and play in the courtyard. A teacher comes by and tells Molly that she is very brave and will be okay. Molly just frowns and turns away. She has started missing school.

When Castrol shows up, he falls asleep. Before his parents died, he was at the top of his class.

"It's sad and very common," Otieno told teachers gathered for a meeting about the growing number of orphaned students.

The school has started more lessons on farming, so that orphans can at least grow their own food.

Otieno is also considering teaching personal hygiene. And maybe hanging up photos of the parents would be a good idea, he said, because he could use them to help orphans cope with memories.

Either way, he needs a way to bring the students back to class.

Phelix, Lily and Clinton don't show up at school anymore. They are all too busy in the fields.

With the help of Lily's brothers, Phelix, 16, and Clinton, 7, they scooped the dirt out of the red earth before sunset.