Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Associated Press - October 17, 1998
Villagers know that AIDS is feeding the burial ground, but they can do little. There is no testing, not much government aid, and the nearest clinic is 12 miles away over rutted dirt roads.
This south-central African country is so poor, and the AIDS epidemic so bad, the government can't do much more than ask villages to help themselves.
A network of village committees was set up several years ago, but quickly fell moribund for lack of direction.
In stepped Save the Children with financing from the U.S. Agency for International Development. The organization set up a program to train villagers in caring for the sick at home, tending to the many children orphaned by AIDS and educating young people to avoid infection.
About 150 such committees have been formed in Malawi's thousands of villages. It is the kind of local, volunteer-based effort that typifies the attempt to grapple with the AIDS epidemic ravaging southern Africa.
In other countries, activists are training traditional healers about the fundamentals of AIDS; members of associations of people infected with the AIDS virus act out dramas in the countryside to preach sexual abstinence or safe sex.
The newly formed committee in Chiphwanya has about a dozen men -- school teachers and farmers, mainly.
They've been registering orphans and guide the Edzi Toto (No to AIDS) club for youngsters. They brought a bit of money to the family of Donata Luka, a 39-year-old woman who lives with her eight children and four grandchildren in her mother-in-law's house.
Mrs. Luka's husband died in late August. She suspects it was AIDS, though no test was done. They rarely are available in such rural areas. "I'm worried about my own health, but especially the little one," she said of 1-year-old Fatima, suckling at her breast. "She falls sick a lot." The other children, dirt-streaked and dressed in tatters, sit quietly in front of the thatched-roof house.
The family gets by with what they can eat, and occasionally sell, from their garden.
Mrs. Luka is lucky to have a place to stay. Under Malawian tradition, not unusual in the region, the family of a dead man often divides up his property, leaving the wife destitute.
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