Zambia Daily Mail - January 21, 2005
Dean Mwaanga

Her father died of AIDS early last year, six months after, her mother also died of HIV/AIDS related complications.

Moonde (16) and her siblings aged 14, 12 and five now have to fend for themselves.

Two weeks after their mother's death, money and food had run out. Moonde the eldest had no option, but to turn to commercial sex work for the family's survival.

Fortunately for her, during one of her survival escapades in her new profession, her would be client ended-up being her sponsor.

The white man she met at one of the famous night spots in Lusaka lived up to his promise to sponsor her at school together with her siblings after learning of her sad story.

Apart from sending enough money to pay for their rentals and food, this "Good Samaritan" also pays for all their educational needs. He is in Denmark.

Moonde is now adequately plays the role of mother to her two younger brothers and a sister without.

"I have been doing everything from laundry to cooking for my younger brothers and sister since our mother died," she said while trying to choke back tears.

This all-children family live in a small room in the sprawling Kanyama compound.

Three months ago, before she met her sponsor, she and her brothers and sister were alternating meals. "If I ate lunch with my other brother today, then we will miss super so that the two who missed lunch can eat also," she said.

At a very young age, she has tended to be a guardian of compassion rather than ambition, of closeness rather than conquest and of mercy rather than judgment to her brothers and sisters.

She is a caretaker of daily life and the custodian and transmitter of community norms and social values to her sister and brothers. Unlike most other women in her age group, she has escaped the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS as women are increasingly becoming infected with HIV.

A recent report by the joint United Nations Programmes on AIDS, UNAIDS, said AIDS was affecting women most severely in places where heterosexual sex is a dominant mode of HIV transmission, as is the case in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean.

The report which was released on the eve of the 2004 World AIDS day, said women and girls make up almost 57 per cent of adults living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Zambia demographic health Survey 2001-2002 data on HIV testing also showed that women were more likely to be HIV positive of the tested individuals.

The report said, overall, the proportion of HIV rises with the age from 5 per cent among the 15-19 to 25 per cent in the 30-34 age group before falling to 17 per cent among those between 45-49. Among the women, the proportion found to be HIV positive rises abruptly with age from 7 per cent among 15-19 cohort to 29 per cent in the 30-34 age group and then drops off to 14 per cent in the 45-49 age group.

In 1986, a critical study by the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, showed one in ten women attending the ante-natal clinic were infected with HIV.

Ten years after the first woman was diagnosed, an estimated three and a half million women are infected, the vast majority through sexual transmission.

Zambia National AIDS Council (NAC) acting manager of programmes, Dr Liya Nawa Mutale, said women in the country are especially vulnerable to the AIDS epidemic in that they hold a subordinate socio-economic position to males in most cases which can make it difficult to protect themselves against HIV.

"Just like the rest of the African women, Zambian women continue to be infected at a higher rate than men. The ratio is highest among young people aged between 15 to 24 years," she said.

Dr Mutale attributed this to the biological fact that HIV is generally transmitted from men to women and the current tendencies of young women having sexual relationships with older men.

According to recent population-based household surveys, adult women in sub-Saharan Africa are up to 1.3 times more likely to be infected with HIV than their male counterparts (UNAIDS, 2004). This unevenness is greatest among young women aged 15-24 years, who are about three times more likely to be infected than young men of the same age.

Dr Mutale said more women are increasingly becoming infected because there is a biological, immunological and/or virological susceptibility in women which changes with age.

She said the major factors in Zambia are the biological fact that HIV is generally easily transmitted from men to women and that sexual activities tend to start earlier for women.

Dr Mutale said current tendencies of young women having sexual relationships with older men and the sexual abuse of the girl child are the other factors that have caused an increase of HIV/AIDS in women.

Unfortunately for women, she said, the major risk factor for HIV infection is being married.

"Even when women maybe more consistently faithful to their partners, their male partners may not be as faithful," said Dr Mutale.

Preventive interventions based on abstinence, be faithful and condom use have proved less meaningful to most women as they lack social and economic empowerment.

"Abstinence can only be easily practiced by single women who are socially and economically able to sustain themselves without having to depend on any male support," she said adding that condom use has been of little help as most women lack economic power to afford a female condom and the social power to negotiate for spouse condom use.

She said this situation can only be reversed if the silence around the infection of young women is challenged at every level: individuals, families, communities and organizations and national.

She said girls and young women must be able to speak out, to cease to feel silenced or powerless to change what happens to them.

An HIV AIDS activist, Ireen Banda, said strategies must also be found that lengthen the time before the onset of sexual intercourse in young women, increase the age at first pregnancy and which increase the ability of young girls to control the situations in which they are sexually active.

"Spaces must be created within which young girls can be free from the threat of HIV infection, within which they can pass more time before leaving to enter the world of sexual relationships and procreation and within which they can talk to each other about their coping and survival strategies, their difficulties and their successes," she said.

Chief Mukwikile, of the Bemba people in Chinsali, who has launched an HIV/AIDS awareness project in his chiefdom, said safe havens must also be found or created which would allow social and emotional interactions between girls and boys, young women and young men.

He said, through these discussions, young people can discuss their protection against HIV/AIDS and set aside the peer pressures, cultural norms and gender archetypes which increase their vulnerability to infection. The growing numbers of women infected and dying bring a deep sadness but must sound an urgent alarm.

Moonde, sitting on her bed in the family's one-room house, says she hopes she can still fulfill her dreams of studying medicine one day. For now, she is glad that she and her brothers and sister have food to eat and they have gone back to school.

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