The Lost Generation and the Orphans

Even if an AIDS vaccine or elixir magically appeared in ARV clinics, the frightening scars of HIV/AIDS will last for several generations. HIV/AIDS has stolen the youth away from South Africa. Ambivalent twelve year old daughters with their frail sixty year old grandmother strain to care for their wasting thirty year old parents. Without a viable working adult in the household, grandmother’s 700 rand pension provides for the family. In more unfortunate cases, grandmother also suffers from the grip of HIV/AIDS, leaving the daughter as the head of the household.

The children stare into the death of their parents without knowing or understanding the HIV status of their parents. However they know the pain and the fear that stems from HIV/AIDS. They feel the anger, the violence, the discrimination, the stigma and the loneliness that stems from the community. Fortunately some communities come together to care for the children before and after the demise of their parents. Still, millions of orphans surrender to the slow death and aftermath of HIV/AIDS without a support of a role model or love one. Furthermore, the millions of orphans will be compounded exponentially as the 40 million HIV positive South African begin to submit to the virus within the next two decades, dismantling an already fractioned post-apartheid South African family network.

In rural South Africa, extended families, neighbors, and communities not orphanages support the dismantled family or care for the orphans. However the sheer overload of death has destroyed family and community structures and thus eroding the ability for families to find mechanisms to cope with the loss of parents and financial support. The orphans teeter from poverty to destitution and neglect. The right to shelter, food, clothing, health, and education for the orphans becomes impossible. Extended families and foster homes tend to deny the orphans these necessities first during financial difficulties.

The stigma of HIV/AIDS force many children into social isolation or in negligent foster homes. Quite often many assume that the child is also infected with HIV, denying schooling, health care access, and opportunities for any future. In school, educators may not recognize the loss, grief, or mourning from the child. Instead the child may be punished for their unstable emotions, leaving the child increasing vulnerable and isolated.

Organizations like Media in Education Trust and HERO provide the foundation of information, counseling, coping skills acquisition, and contact in order to change attitudes and behaviors. The community-based approach deals beyond the physical plight of the orphans and into the stigma at a collective and individual level. Their strategy to educate community leaders, teachers, and parents reduces the stigma surrounding children affected by AIDS. Consequently these adults learn to build empathy and skills to empower the orphans. Most importantly the adults learn to remember that these head of the household grown-up orphans are still joyous children in need of occasional tuck in the bed and night time story.