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Date Posted: 22:34:09 12/01/02 Sun
Author: weird_enigma
Author Host/IP: 209.252.119.119
Subject: hunger pits African villagers against each other

Orphans get little help from relatives
Tradition pushed aside as hunger pits villagers against each other
SUDARSAN RAGHAVAN
Knight Ridder

NDZEVANE, Swaziland - Since his parents died of AIDS, Mbongeni Mngometulu has been a mother, a father, a brother and an uncle.

He makes sure his two siblings and two nephews, all younger than 13, get enough sleep. And like any caring adult, he worries about how he's going to feed his family at a time when food and work are as scarce as rain.

Mbongeni is 15.

Across southern Africa, a generation of parents is dying and leaving a generation of orphans. Many are heading families. Others are growing up without the traditional lessons passed down from parent to child, including the farming skills that could help them cope with future emergencies.

"How do we take this generation and rebuild?" said Alan Brody, the head of the United Nations Children's Fund in the capital, Mbabane.

The seven nations most severely affected by the food emergency are also at the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic, which has infected 28.5 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. By 2010, AIDS is expected to leave 20 million African children without one or both parents, according to U.N. projections.

In Swaziland, a tiny kingdom of fewer than a million people nestled between South Africa and Mozambique, the number of orphans has doubled since the year 2000 to 40,000 this year, UNICEF says. AIDS has infected 33 percent of the population -- the world's second highest AIDS rate, after Botswana's -- and each year will produce another 10,000 orphans, the agency predicts.

It could get worse. Few Africans can afford expensive AIDS-fighting drugs such as AZT, and good nutrition plays a vital role in slowing the progression of HIV infection to full-blown AIDS. Hunger has become a catalyst for death.

Mbongeni's father died in 1998, his mother last year. They both "got thinner and thinner and got sores," recalled the tall boy with spindly legs, who wore a dusty blue tank top, maroon shorts and no shoes.

On her deathbed, Mbongeni's mother made him promise never to leave their house -- land is very important to most Swazis -- or his siblings Sbongeleni, 12, and Shekisi, 11. He had no choice. His uncle, who had a large family of his own, refused to adopt them. It's a common trend these days, aid workers say.

A few months later, Mbongeni's elder sister died in her late 20s of "a pain inside her stomach" and her children, Celmusa, 11, and Khusi, 7, arrived on his doorstep. Their father had abandoned them long ago.

The five children live in a crumbling, tin-roofed house cluttered with unwashed plates, a tattered suitcase, two straw mattresses and a pile of dirty clothes.

Mbongeni never learned any farming skills from his father, a mineworker in South Africa who spent little time at home.

This year, a kind neighbor helped him plant seeds and plow the field. But the harvest was poor, and Mbongeni and his family now depend on food aid. In one room, there are two keg-sized baskets of corn. Weevils and other insects are nibbling at the grain. Mbongeni hopes he can make it stretch till the end of the year.

"Then I'm going to go around begging for food," he said.

Each morning, Mbongeni prepares a breakfast of cornmeal donated by aid agencies. He then goes to school while the other children stay home. After school, he earns as much as 50 cents a day fetching water for neighbors, often walking two miles. He uses the money to buy soap, tomatoes and cabbages for his family.

But in these desperate times there's less and less work, and hungry neighbors have begun taking advantage.

"When the kids are alone and I'm in school, some people have been coming and helping themselves to our maize," said Mbongeni, using the word for corn.

Mbongeni resents his patriarchal status. Like any teenager, he would like to use the money he earns to buy clothes. The only gift he's treated himself to is a secondhand watch, which he wears to sleep. And he knows that if the food crisis worsens, he may have to drop out of school to feed his family.

"I don't have the capacity at this age to do this, because at this age I'm the one who should be fed and looked after," said Mbongeni, whispering so his family can't hear him. "It doesn't make me happy."

He gazed past a dry, weed-infested field bathed in the orange light of a majestic African sunset. His eyes came to rest on three mounds of red bricks at the edge of a withered row of crops. They are the graves of his mother, father and sister.

The solution, aid workers and Swazi government officials say, is to rebuild the shattered traditional structures in villages and families. Swaziland's government is trying to organize rural communities to help take care of the orphans in the villages. Officials also plan to give allowances to women who become foster mothers.

Government officials say they're spending the few resources they have to fight AIDS. But King Mswati III, the nation's flamboyant young ruler, is buying a $48 million presidential jet, despite complaints from foreign donors. That amount is nine times the nation's budget deficit. The government says the king will use the plane to seek foreign aid and lure investors to get itself out of its food crisis.

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