Dear Marcello,
The AIDS article below is the most bleak to have come out of mother Africa!!
You remember that King Muswati III bought himself a private jet, for over US$ 40 million. And this year there has been a massive effort in Swaziland to build ten palaces each for each 'wife' of Muswati. On top of that each wife is to be availed an top-end Mercedes befitting a wife of a king!!
Meanwhile, orphans and the general population starve to death in the most harrowing of circumstances!!
Muswati deserves worse than the fate of Romania's Chachesco or that of Haille Selassie at the hands of Mengistu. i.e. To be shot like a dog.
But even that is no solution or relief to a situation that is beyond description.
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A Hollowed Generation | Plunge in Life Expectancy: Hut by Hut, AIDS Steals Life
in a Southern Africa Town
November 28, 2004
By MICHAEL WINES and SHARON LaFRANIERE
LAVUMISA, Swaziland - Victim by victim, AIDS is steadily
boring through the heart of this small town.
It killed the mayor's daughter. It has killed a fifth of
the 60 employees of the town's biggest businessman. It has
claimed an estimated one in eight teachers, several health
workers and 2 of 10 counselors who teach prostitutes about
protected sex. One of the 13 municipal workers has died of
AIDS. Another is about to. A third is H.I.V.-positive.
By one hut-to-hut survey in 2003, one in four households on
the town's poorer side lost someone to AIDS in the
preceding year. One in three had a visibly ill member.
That is just the dead and the dying. There is
also the
world they leave behind. AIDS has turned one in 10
Lavumisans into an orphan. It has spawned street children,
prostitutes and dropouts. It has thrust grandparents and
sisters and aunts into the unwanted roles of substitutes
for dead fathers and mothers. It has bred destitution,
hunger and desperation among the living.
It has the appearance of a biblical cataclysm, a
thousand-year flood of misery and death. In fact, it is all
too ordinary. Tiny Lavumisa, population 2,000, is the
template for a demographic plunge taking place in every
corner of southern Africa.
Across the region, AIDS has reduced life expectancy to
levels not seen since the 1800's. In six sub-Saharan
nations, the United Nations estimates, the average child
born today will not live to 40.
Here in Swaziland, a kingdom about the size of New Jersey
with
one million people tucked into South Africa's
northeast corner, two in five adults are infected with
H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. Life expectancy now
averages 34.4 years, the fourth lowest on earth. Fifteen
years ago, it stood at 55. By 2010, experts predict, it
will be 30.
Epidemics typically single out the aged and young - the
weak, not those at society's core. So what happens to a
society when its fulcrum - its mothers and fathers,
teachers, nurses, farm workers, bookkeepers, cooks, clerks
- die in their prime?
Part of the answer lies in Lavumisa, where two visitors
spent five weeks recently talking to more than 60
residents, following the terrible ripples that an
unrestrained epidemic is sending through the community.
Sickness leads to death, death leads to destitution,
destitution worsens a host of social ills, from
illiteracy
to prostitution to abandoned babies. Multiply a single
illness or death scores of times, and a town like Lavumisa
begins to unravel.
The average life expectancy here is 34 years, but there are
fewer and fewer 34-year-olds - just the very young and the
old, struggling to do a 34-year-old's job.
Today, Lavumisa's schools are collapsing. Crime is
climbing. Medical clinics are jammed. Family assets are
sold to fend off hunger. The sick are dying, sometimes
alone, because they are too many, and the caretakers are
too few.
Much of this is occurring because adults whose labors once
fed children and paid school fees and sustained families
are dead. Lavumisa's lost generation of adults has reached
beyond the grave, robbing survivors of their aspirations,
reducing promising lives to struggles for existence.
Sixteen-year-old Nkuthula Madlopha wanted to be a police
officer. Instead, next year she will till her grandparents'
fields, filling in for her dead parents. Her brother will
herd livestock.
Their grandmother, Vayillina Madlopha, wanted a quiet old
age. Instead, at 80, she is a new mother. "I thought my
daughters-in-law would be serving me food, washing for me
and cleaning the yard," she said. "Now I must start
afresh."
Eleven-year-old Ntokozo wanted to be a third grader.
Instead, he lies on the floor of his one-room hut, his
knees swollen like baseballs and his mouth pitted with
sores. His mother, who died in May, infected him with
H.I.V., either during her pregnancy or later as he helped
tend her oozing sores. His sister, Nkululeko Masimula, 26,
wanted a job. " I wanted to have my own business; to be a
hairdresser or a
wholesaler," she said. Instead, she tends
her brother and their 61-year-old grandmother. She sells
the family's chickens to raise money for food. Finding the
$20 a month required to take her brother to the nearest
antiretroviral drug site, 60 miles away, is a pipe dream.
Dido Khosa, 9, wants his mother back. "She used to cook
food, wash my clothes, do things for me," he said, sobbing.
Instead, he describes a life of regular beatings by his
father and his father's girlfriend and periodic escapes to
the homes of neighbors.
Delisile Nyandeli, slim and pretty, wanted her own home and
family. Instead, she cares not only for her orphaned
sisters and brothers, but also for the orphaned children of
two sisters who died of AIDS and whose husbands fled. At
age 20, she is a mother to nine other children besides her
own boy.
"Today, when
I was cleaning this house," she said, "I
thought about it - if my mother were alive, she would be
the one doing this. Because when my sisters don't have any
pencils or other things they need for school, they come to
me.
"And I can't help them."
A Hard Life Made Harder
Baked by drought, blessed with a single paved street, a gas
station, two liquor stores, two bars and a wretched crafts
stand for tourists speeding from the adjacent South Africa
border post, Lavumisa clings to Swaziland's lower rungs.
Life would be hard here, even without AIDS.
A mostly rainless decade has discouraged most farmers from
planting maize, the staple crop, much less the cotton that
once underpinned the local economy. Many survive on
homegrown chickens and pigs, donations from the World Food
Program and the kindness of relatives who work across
the
border or in Swaziland's better-off cities.
The town does not keep death statistics. Most people
quietly bury relatives in their yards or nearby fields
rather than buy a cemetery plot. But Mzweleni Dlamini, the
acting chief for Lavumisa and the surrounding region, does
not need a tally to tell him the toll is very high.
Two years ago, he shifted his regular meeting with
subordinates from weekends to Tuesdays because Saturdays
and Sundays were consumed by funerals. Now he has given
permission for weekday funerals because there are too many
dead for the traditional weekend services alone.
With the dead gone, it is the impoverished survivors' turn
to suffer.
At Lavumisa Primary School, a beige L-shaped building of
concrete classrooms clumped around a red dirt yard,
enrollment has fallen nearly 9 percent in five years,
to
494 students, as children drop out to support families. One
in three students has lost at least one parent.
Nomfundo, a 15-year-old seventh grader, made the four-mile
trek home from school one recent day with her brother,
Ndabendele, 10. He carried his books in a torn plastic bag.
She sported the shaved head customary for girls in
mourning.
Their 34-year-old mother, a domestic worker, died Aug. 29;
their father died in 2003. Care of the children has fallen
to their grandmother, Esther Simelane, 53, who has been
jobless for 14 years.
Since the illnesses began, she has sold four of the
family's eight goats to raise money for food.
"Wheesh! Now I can feel the hardship," Nomfundo said. "Who
is going to pay my school fees? Even the clothes. Where am
I going to get them?" She tugged at her school uniform
skirt, riddled
with holes and hemmed several times to hide
tears.
"I feel small," she said. "We used to have track suits. Now
we no longer have track suits. Other kids say, 'Oh, now you
don't have a track suit. Not even shoes! Now you are on the
same level as us.' "
Actually, the two children are headed lower. Unbeknownst to
them, their grandmother has tested positive for H.I.V.,
apparently contracting the virus while dressing her
daughter's bleeding sores. Mrs. Simelane has kept the news
from Nomfundo and her brother to spare them further trauma.
Should Nomfundo manage to stay in school another year, she
will move up to Ndabazezwe High School. Elphas Z. Shiba,
the headmaster, keeps careful track of his 366 students in
stacks of ledgers.
Mr. Shiba can state that at the beginning of this year,
Ndabazezwe High had 40 students who had
lost at least one
parent. Nine months later, there were 73, 20 of whom had
lost both father and mother, nearly all of whom are
desperately poor. A decade ago, Mr. Shiba said, the school
had perhaps five orphans, none of them needy.
Both the primary and the high school are staggering under
the burden of feeding and educating a growing army of
orphans who, by and large, cannot pay the school fees. The
state has pledged to pay to educate orphans, but so far it
has picked up but half the Lavumisa primary-school fees.
Mr. Shiba said the high school was getting a mere $15 of
the $100 a year it costs to educate each orphan.
Ndabazezwe High School is now deeply in debt by Swazi
standards. It owes $275 for electricity; $200 for water;
$260 for books and hundreds more for office equipment. The
security guards have not been paid in two months.
Borrowed
money bought the woodworking and home-economics materials
needed for final exams. Even school lunches are
hit-or-miss.
Mr. Shiba and Stephen Nxumalo, the headmaster at Lavumisa
Primary, reluctantly intend to carry out a resolution
adopted in May by the nation's main teachers' organization.
Starting in January, students who do not pay their fees -
currently about 100 in the primary school, 258 in the high
school - will be barred from classes.
"The number of those who don't pay keeps increasing," Mr.
Nxumalo said. "It's because of the orphans. We are going to
send them home, because we have no option."
Tibuthye, Sandile and Nkuthula Madlopha stand to be among
the first to go.
Their parents are buried on a hillside outside Lavumisa.
Their father died in 1999 at 46; their mother three years
later at 32. The
father's parents, 80-year-old Vayillina
Madlopha and her 82-year-old husband, Ellias, now raise
three children, ages 10, 12 and 16, on Ellias's $75-a-month
pension.
For the old couple, the son's death was a double blow. Gone
is the $30 a month that he gave them to supplement their
meager income. Gone is the extra labor and money for diesel
fuel that he provided during the planting season on their
farm. Their fields of maize, pumpkin and beans now lie
fallow.
After school one day, Mrs. Madlopha bent over an open fire,
teaching 10-year-old Tibuthye how to bake buns to sell at
school for a few cents. "I am old, I will die," she said.
"They must learn how to work, so they will be able to do
these things on their own."
Nkuthula, 16, has plans for after her graduation. "I want
to be a police," she said in halting English. But
the
Madlophas cannot afford to fix their broken tractor, much
less to educate three children.
"They need too many exercise books and school uniforms,"
Mrs. Madlopha said. "We can't afford all that. We are
failing them."
Grim Choices for Children
What has befallen the Madlophas is happening across
Lavumisa. When a family loses a parent to AIDS, public
health experts here say, the household production of maize
quickly falls by half; the number of livestock owned by
nearly a third. It is the equivalent of draining the bank
account.
Unable to both feed and educate their children,
impoverished single parents frequently farm them out to
relatives, following an axiom of Swazi culture that one
takes care of one's own blood, no matter the cost. One in
six families has already has taken in a child left
parentless by AIDS,
according to the World Food Program.
"We Swazis don't believe there are orphans," said
Lavumisa's mayor, Victor Simelane, who is not related to
Esther. "But now the extended families cannot support the
magnitude of the orphans."
Increasingly, such children face a grim choice: either seek
shelter with whomever will take them in, or live on the
streets.
As he walked down Lavumisa's main drag, yards from the
South African border gate one afternoon last month, the
mayor spotted Thabiso Mavimbela, 12, darting across the
macadam. "You see," he said, "here is one of these street
kids. They don't have extended families. They're loitering
around the town." Five years ago, he said, such kids did
not exist.
Thabiso's world is a fearful place. He spends much of his
after-school time on Lavumisa's streets. After his mother
died
five years ago, his father abandoned him. He ended up
in his great-grandmother's mud-and-stone hut, , its walls a
checkerboard of holes and openings stuffed with rags, down
a rutted dirt road from the primary school.
The two sleep on grass mats on the dirt floor. Thabiso's
uncle occupies the only foam mattress. Thabiso has no
toothbrush, no washcloth, nothing except his tattered
clothes. At night, he said, mice bite his feet.
Those are the least of his problems. "My uncle tells me:
'When your great-grandmother dies, I will kill you too,' "
he said. Panicky, he grinds his wet eyes into the cuff of
his green-and-yellow school uniform. "I know that when she
dies, I have to be killed. I don't have any other place to
go."
Thabiso's uncle says the boy is treated well. But in an
interview in early September, his aunt, Thembi
Simelane,
said Thabiso sometimes sought refuge in her home, declaring
that he would rather sleep on his mother's grave than in a
hut with his uncle.
Ms. Simelane once was Thabiso's lifeline. Despite losing
her husband to AIDS three years ago and rearing her own
five children, she supported the child with profits from
clothes bought in South Africa and resold in Lavumisa. But
she had to abandon that work last year when she, too, fell
ill.
Last January, she tested positive for H.I.V. "My days are
numbered," she told a visitor in September.
She showed a speechless Thobile Jele, a social worker at
the mayor's office, a will scrawled in black crayon on
school notebook paper. It bequeathed to Ms. Jele her five
children. It did not mention Thabiso.
At the end of October, Ms. Simelane died.
Roaming
Lavumisa's streets
with Thabiso is Dido Khosa, 9, whose
mother died in 2002 at age 28. His father and his new
girlfriend now care for him, after a fashion.
When a neighbor questioned him some weeks ago, Dido told
her he had spent two days alone at home without food.
Filching family money to buy bread, he said, brings a stiff
penalty. Pulling down his dirty sweat pants, Dido displayed
a two-inch scar on his thigh where, he said, his father had
beaten him with a pipe. He worried an abscessed tooth with
a stick.
"I eat when there is food at school," he said.
Asked who takes care of him, he replied, "No one."
In
August, Lavumisans noted a new sign of the growing stress
on families: two abandoned babies, left on doorsteps days
apart.
A Weakened Work Force
In a way, one might not expect the hollowing out of
Lavumisa's adult
population to have much affected its
minuscule economy. Unemployment in Swaziland averages 34
percent. There is no shortage of cheap labor to replace a
fallen clerk or farm worker.
But the death rate is transforming businesses and the work
force, in ways not easily visible.
Peter McIntyre, 66, is one of Lavumisa's real estate
baron's and probably its biggest private employer, owner of
a grocery store, a liquor store, the gas station and the
Lavumisa Hotel. He has lost about a fifth of his 60 workers
to AIDS; the latest, a yard worker named Julius, died Oct.
4. Another worker is dying, he said; she begs him daily to
look after her five children when she is gone.
Employees like the yard worker are easily replaced. Not so
his accountant, who died of AIDS in 2001. Mr. McIntyre's
relatives said it took three months to find and train
a
qualified replacement.
His three sons, in their 30's and heirs to the empire, see
a lesson in that. The South African government intends to
buy the land beneath the grocery and hotel and build a new
border crossing. The sons are not sure that they want to
rebuild after the sale.
"My sons are very wary to open a new shop," Mr. McIntyre
said. "They say you have so many hassles - people dying;
you can't build a permanent staff. I don't know where it is
going to end, what's going to happen to Swaziland."
Medical clinics are caught in a double squeeze, with
mushrooming caseloads and a steadily sicker staff. Visits
to Lavumisa's one-room medical clinic have jumped by nearly
a fifth since 2000. At the regional health center in nearby
Matsanjeni, home to the only doctor within at least 30
miles, outpatient visits have tripled since
1998.
The Matsanjeni clinic is chronically short-staffed. On an
average day, officials say, at least one of its 18 nurses
is either sick or on leave for a funeral. The administrator
suspects that the recent deaths of at least two clinic
workers were caused by AIDS. Mothers-to-be suffer most; the
prenatal clinic is closed much of the time.
Only one segment of the economy is prospering. In the
Lavumisa region, with 21,000 residents, reported crimes
over a three-month period - largely burglaries, assaults
and thefts of goats or cows - have increased 25 percent in
two years.
Prostitution is booming. On the broad dirt road that
parallels the South Africa border sit the Lavumisa Hotel,
the town's two bars and, each evening, a string of
18-wheelers parked for the night. More than 1,100 rigs
cross this border every month, fueling a
growing sex trade
with local women.
In 2000, a report for the United States Agency for
International Development concluded that Lavumisa had five
resident sex workers. On a recent Thursday night, perhaps a
dozen worked the bars.
Some are recent AIDS orphans. They are driven by their
poverty: performing sex with a condom nets a woman about
$4.50; without a condom, perhaps $9. An enterprising sex
worker can make $50 a night.
"I used to stay with my mother and father, before they died
of H.I.V. illness," said Thebisa, 18, during a break at the
Lavumisa Hotel bar. "And then I couldn't afford to go to
school. My father died in '98. The following year, it was
my mother. I began working this way in 2000."
Her 19-year-old friend, Dabsile, another AIDS orphan, said:
"A lot of my friends are in this business. Some of us,
it's
because there's nobody to look after us. For some of us,
it's because there's peer pressure."
Dabsile said she was terrified of getting AIDS, and in
fact, AIDS warnings are plastered on storefronts and
billboards in Lavumisa. Jars of free condoms sit on the
border-crossing counters and on other counters across town.
Counselors advise prostitutes and truckers alike about
protected sex.
Yet Dabsile has never worried enough to take an H.I.V. test
or to insist on condoms with her boyfriend, who knew
nothing of her truck-stop trade. They initially had
protected sex, she said, "but as time goes on, you don't as
much."
A Gathering Storm
Lavumisa and other towns like it are windows into the
crisis that has beset Swaziland. AIDS kills an estimated 50
people here and H.I.V. infects 55 more each day, erasing
hard-won
economic gains of the last 20 years, according to
the United Nations and the World Health Organization.
"It is the most efficient impoverishing agent you can find;
it just sucks out the resources," said Dr. Derek von
Wissell, who directs Swaziland's National Emergency
Response Council on H.I.V./AIDS, the agency charged with
stemming the epidemic.
Until the late 1990's, when AIDS began to hit with force,
Swaziland seemed a society on its way up, making strides in
health care, education and income. No more.
Economic growth and agricultural production have slowed.
School enrollment is down. Poverty, malnutrition and infant
mortality are up. By 2010, the United Nations forecasts,
children who have lost one parent or both will account for
up to 15 percent of Swaziland's one million people.
The adult H.I.V. infection rate, 38.8
percent, now tops
Botswana's as the world's highest. The death rate has
doubled in just seven years.
"Swaziland is frankly beyond the threshold of what we
thought could happen," said Duncan Earle of the Global Fund
to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, who oversees $48
million in AIDS-related grants to the kingdom. "Ten years
ago, we thought the peak infection rate would be 20 to 25
percent. This stretches the imagination."
A long-promised flood of antiretroviral drugs financed by
the Global Fund and other donors could help stem the
carnage. But like the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, Swaziland
is starting slowly. Only about 4,000 of the 26,000 who need
drugs get them. Perhaps 8,000 will have them by the end of
2005.
In 16 months, the Global Fund has disbursed $5.1 million in
AIDS grants to Swaziland. Yet not until this month
did the
overwhelmed Health Ministry hire its first two doctors to
work on H.I.V. programs. Some $2.8 million earmarked for
orphans' education is locked in the Treasury, even as the
government this year spent $600,000 on the king's 36th
birthday party.
To the United Nations envoy for AIDS in Africa, Stephen
Lewis, it is hard to fathom the consequences awaiting a
nation with a vanishing middle generation.
"I resist an apocalyptic scenario," Mr. Lewis said. "But I
have to admit, in the middle of the night I ask myself:
'How are these societies going to survive?' "
Lavumisa's story is not entirely bleak. Two decades into
the epidemic, Mayor Simelane said, people here are
"beginning to accept that they are being attacked by this
monster" instead of linking AIDS to witchcraft or a white
plot against blacks.
The city allots
2 percent of its limited budget to
anti-AIDS social work, and has a $2,000 emergency fund for
burying the dead. Chief Dlamini, King Mswati III's
representative to the area, has dedicated three acres to a
garden for orphans. A free feeding center for orphans is
under construction near the town butchery. The high school
has started a garden to feed hungry students.
A new mobile H.I.V. testing center is drawing customers on
its weekly visits. One recent afternoon, two dozen people,
mostly women, waited for it to open. At the Matsanjeni
regional health center, seven miles away, a counselor said
350 to 400 people had visited since testing began last
December.
But for every resident who faces AIDS or steels himself for
a test, another shies away, fearful of the outcome.
Busisiwe Matse, a 44-year-old mother of six, went to
the
center in early October. Her husband, Boy, a former miner,
is bedridden with symptoms of AIDS. She had been almost
constantly ill for nearly a year. She was almost relieved,
she said, when the counselor informed her that she was
infected because now she can seek treatment.
Boy Matse's other wife, Khanyisile, 27, refuses to check
her own status. "I'll do it later," she said.
Dr. von Wissell, the Swazi AIDS czar, has an ambitious
agenda to reach families like the Matses. He plans to use
Global Fund money to speed drugs, food and social support
to towns hits by AIDS and to increase care for orphans.
Despite a sluggish start, he said, the government is moving
as quickly as the frail health infrastructure permits.
Antiretroviral treatment could be available near Lavumisa
in six months, he said, but that will not be enough to
halt
the epidemic.
He does not know, he acknowledged, how much worse that
epidemic will become.
Virtually all the Swazis dying today were infected in the
1990's, when the infection rate was far lower than it is
today. Those who are just now infected will not fall
gravely ill until about 2012 - a tidal wave of illness and
death that is still eight years away.
How Lavumisa and other similar towns will cope with that is
anyone's guess. "Nobody has ever walked that road," Dr. von
Wissell said. "Nobody."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/international/africa/28swazi.html?ex=1102756502&ei=1&en=f819adc9714ee6f3
---------------------------------
"Americans are born in a half-savage country" Ezra Pound, 1885 - 1972.
Mitayo Potosi
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