BLANTYRE, Oct 4, 2006 (AFP) - Pop diva Madonna arrived in Malawi on Wednesday to inspect a five-million-dollar project she has funded to support the poor African country's growing number of AIDS orphans and possibly adopt an African child.
"Madonna arrived this morning on a private visit to see for herself various programmes on the ground she is funding to do with undeprivileged children," Andrina Mchiela, principal secretary in the ministry of women and gender, told AFP.
Mchiela said the US singer and actress, was welcomed by senior government officials on her arrival in a private jet in the administrative capital, Lilongwe.
"She is insisting that her visit to Malawi be very private... She does not want to draw attention to herself but to focus on the programmes she is funding that will alleviate thousands of underprivileged children and orphans," she said.
Madonna, who has two children of her own, has pumped five million dollars into various programmes for poor children, including the construction of an orphanage centre in Mchinji, 115 kilometres (72 miles) east of Lilongwe.
Malawi has two million vulnerable children and nearly 1.5 million of them are orphans whose parents have died of AIDS, Mchiela said.
"The orphanage problem has reached a crisis point in Malawi, as evidenced by those loitering around the streets.
"A lot of children are not going to school. Many households are being headed by orphans because the parents are gone," Mchiela said.
She said there were tentative plans for Madonna to adopt one or two orphans to "give them a better life and education".
"She is interested in children and she wants to go and change their nappies," Mchiela said.
In an interview with Time magazine in August, the former "Material Girl", who has reinvented her public image several times, explained her new socially conscious persona.
"Now that I have children and now that I have what I consider to be a better perspective on life, I have felt responsible for the children of the world,"Madonna explained.
"I've been doing bits and bobs about it and I suppose I was looking for a big, big project I could sink my teeth into," she said, referring to the project in Malawi.
She said a care centre for orphans in Malawi would "be like a day camp for orphans, who often have relatives who will give them a place to sleep but cannot feed them".
Madonna, a convert to Kabbalah or the study of Jewish mysticism, said her new faith had given her a fresh perspective on life.
"One of the main precepts of Kabbalah is that we're put on this earth to help people. And your job is to figure out how you can help and what it is that you can do."
AIDS, which afflicts 14.4 percent of the country's 12 million people, has cut life expectancy in Malawi to 36.
About 900,000 Malawians are living with HIV/AIDS and some 70,000 adults here die of the disease every year.
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