WINDHOEK, Dec 20 (AFP) - Clutching her script, 15-year-old Delfi Kamush speaks into the microphone, her voice trembling as she recounts her life as one of Namibia's growing legion of orphans.
"My mother was Angolan and my father is Namibian", Delfi recalls. "I was three when he went back to Namibia. Then my mother died, I was nine years old, and an aunt brought me to him in Namibia."
Her father had by then started another life with a new wife and had two children. After two years, the couple split up, her father lost his job and Delfi was placed in the care of a friend.
Delfi's father went to northern Namibia to find work, and has since seldom contacted his daughter.
"After two years that friend got tired of looking after me. A social worker came and brought me to this children's home", she says.
"Here they care for us very well, though I long for my parents", says Delfi who gave her account at last week's release of a report on the state of orphans and other vulnerable children in Namibia compiled by the UN children's agency, UNICEF.
Delfi -- not her real name -- is one of over 100 children living in the Namibia Children's Home in Windhoek, established by a local church in 1990 and later taken over by the government.
"We usually keep the children for six months as we try to place them with their extended family," said Ilse Louw, a social worker at the home.
"Delfi's case is special, she lives here virtually on a permanent basis, we hope that her father can take her back, one day, when he finds a job", she said.
Some 120,000 Namibian children under 17 years are orphaned, according to the report and only 26 percent of children under 15 are living with both their parents.
Nearly half of the orphaned children -- 57,000 -- have lost one parent or both to AIDS.
About one in four adults are estimated to be living with HIV or AIDS in Namibia, a poor desert country that broke away from South Africa in 1990.
In Namibia's rural areas, children can be seen planting maize, herding cattle and looking after younger siblings, because both parents have died and they must head the household now.
UNICEF estimates that by 2021, one third of its children under the age of 18, or 250,000, will be orphaned in Namibia.
"The government has set up an orphan fund," said Child Welfare Minister Marlene Mungunda. Already, more than 14,000 orphans and vulnerable children are receiving support from the government.
The government is planning to conduct a census next year to keep track of the orphans and other vulnerable children, whose numbers are expected to grow.
"By then I will be in the medical profession. I want to put a doctor title before my name", says Delfi, her voice now firm.
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