Mpume Shezi was a baby when her
parents died of AIDS.
For the past 10 years, her
grandmother has watched over her, her older sister and eight orphan
cousins in a collection of mud-and-daub huts clinging to a
windswept hillside in Qudeni, a remote village in South Africa's
eastern KwaZulu-Natal province.
The struggle to feed and clothe
10 people for a decade on an old-age pension - about $100 a month -
is evident from Mpume's ancient pink rubber shoes which no longer
have soles.
"The hardest thing is when we
run out of food that granny has bought and when we run out of
clothes and granny cannot even get any from neighbours, and we have
nothing," the 10-year-old said softly, her hands clasped on her
threadbare yellow skirt.
Hunger and poverty are just some
of the threats facing the AIDS orphans of Qudeni, a village that,
like thousands of other villages in South Africa, is struggling not
just with the virus but the aftermath of a generation of parents
lost to AIDS.
The social fallout from a
disease that has left an estimated 2.3 million South African
children to be raised without parents is proving particularly hard
to manage, experts say.
South Africa has the world's
biggest AIDS epidemic. About 6.3 million people of its 53 million
population are HIV-positive, nearly 20 percent of the adult
population, according to U.N. AIDS. Millions have died since the
epidemic began.
But work to tackle the virus has
made huge progress.
Since 2010, annual deaths from
the disease - once as high as a third of a million people a year -
have fallen by more than a third as drug treatment
improves.
Weekend traffic jams of families
headed to funerals - once a normal part of life in places like
Soweto - have ended.
Treatment, not so long ago
costly, complex and hard to access, is much simpler: one pill a
day, free through government health services for those sick enough
for treatment. Today 2.7 million people are taking the drugs,
according to U.N. AIDS.
"It's been a remarkable
turnaround," said Brian Brink, the former chief medical officer for
mining group Anglo American and one of the earliest advocates for
broad AIDS treatment in South Africa, after successes in the
company's own programme.
Now HIV "is like a disability
you can get around. The ability to manage the epidemic is
extraordinary", he said.
CRIME - AND NEW
INFECTIONS
However the plight of the
generation left behind has drawn less attention, as medical
successes fill the headlines.
In communities around Qudeni, as
a generation of orphans reach their teenage years, crimes like
robbery and rape are being reported with worrying regularity,
residents say.
"The problems are getting worse
and worse," said Eunice Khanyile, who runs a government-funded soup
kitchen in Qudeni.
"Grandmothers are being robbed
and raped on pension day. The fathers who once structured the boys
and helped them grow up are not there," she told the Thomson
Reuters Foundation.
Themba Mchunu, Qudeni's
traditional leader, agrees those committing crimes "are the ones
who mainly never had parents".
Many orphan teenage girls,
looking for love and financial support, are turning to
relationships with older men, getting pregnant, dropping out of
school and finding themselves HIV positive, school, health and
community officials say.
In South Africa, just 4 percent
of boys and young men 15 to 24 years old carry the virus that
causes AIDS. Among girls the same age, the rate is 13 percent,
according to Southern African Development Community (SADC)
figures.
AIDS is the number one cause of
death among adolescents in Africa with 7 in every 10 new infections
in sub-Saharan Africa among girls aged 15-19, according to
UNICEF.
"Without parents, these girls
have no stability. When men come and say nice things to them, they
easily go with them," said Nhalani Helngiwe Dlamini, a community
development worker.
Zitha Shelembe, principal at
Bhuqwini Secondary School in Qudeni, said there was "a lasting
psychological impact" from AIDS deaths among parents.
"(Teenagers) are discovering who
they are, and at that stage they are confused and vulnerable," he
said.
"If they have to, they will go
outside the family to find a shoulder to cry on. They trust that
person and they should not."
Teenagers in Qudeni - like young
people everywhere - dream big, of college and good jobs. Many say
they want to become doctors who work in Qudeni to help quash AIDS
for good.
"If I can study and be a doctor,
I want to come back right here," said Mpume. "The greatest thing I
could see is bringing money to my granny to take care of the rest
of the family."
Dlamini, the social worker whose
home looks out on Mpume's grandmother's scattering of huts - which
lie more than 20 km (12 miles) from even the nearest paved road -
isn't so sure about the girl's ambitions.
"Life in this household is not
promising," she said. "As these girls grow, boys will come around
and mess up their lives even further. When girls grow up this way,
they end up finding comfort in men."
How often that search for
comfort goes wrong is evident at the neat, red-brick health clinic
in Qudeni.
HIV counsellor Siridisiwe
Sikhakhame says most of the new HIV-infected patients are girls in
their teens or early 20s
"Mostly they are pregnant when
they come in. When you ask them how they got it, they say, 'My
boyfriend has other girlfriends'," she said.
In an effort to address South
Africa's high HIV transmission rate among girls, a variety of
programmes are experimenting with setting up cash transfers to
girls to give them a source of income and reduce the temptation to
turn to an older boyfriend.
One, based in KwaZulu Natal
province, offers girls cash to stay in school, pass their exams and
undergo regular HIV tests.
Another programme in
Khayelitsha, an informal township in Cape Town, offers free soccer
coaching and teams for teenage girls and boys, with coaching in
"life skills" - like avoiding HIV - included as well, Brink
said.
While the efforts are still in
early stages, their backers hope they will be able to curb HIV
infections and help meet a U.S.-backed goal to reduce HIV incidence
among girls and young women by 40 percent in hard-hit parts of 10
sub-Saharan African countries by the end of 2017.
"As a society we have to do
better," Brink said. The infection rate now "is unconscionable. We
have to be serious and find ways to get the new infection rate to
zero."
Thomson Reuters
Foundation
