The Associated Press - July 3, 1999
Deborah Hastings, Associated Press Writer

The teen-agers, two feet away, are stone drunk from guzzling buckets of 100-proof, homemade beer called kachasu, and sniffing jekem -- fermented human feces scraped from sewer pipes. They stab at each other with screwdrivers and swing lengths of metal pipe.

It is dark and cold and about 40 filthy, barefoot street children gather on the dirt and concrete strip that divides this capital's main thoroughfare, waiting for Rodgers Mwewa and his promise of food. The wait is long and a melee has erupted over a stolen pair of shoes.

Into the middle of this mess wades Mwewa, a 28-year-old Zambian relief worker with more heart than common sense. Heedless of the danger, he has assembled these children in the wide center of two-lane Cairo Road, which teems with speeding minibuses. The sidewalks are worked by pickpockets, some the very ones Mwewa has come to feed.

Some 90,000 children live on the streets of Zambia. Many are the sole survivors of families destroyed by HIV. This Southern African country of 9.5 million is home to the world's highest concentration of AIDS orphans, according to the United Nations. More than half of all Zambian children -- an estimated 600,000 -- have lost at least one parent, most to the epidemic.

The country's future is an abandoned, lost generation.

On this recent night, they fight each other for Mwewa's pots of stewed meat and nsima, a bread-like staple made from cornmeal that has the consistency of wallpaper paste. It fills hungry stomachs but provides little nutrition.

Zambia, a British colony until 1964, is one of the world's poorest countries and one of the hardest hit by AIDS. Death is so common, coffins are sold out of brightly colored vans parked on roadsides.

Downtown Lusaka is a ragtag collection of plywood market stalls selling everything from bananas to hand-woven cloth. Its main drag is punctuated by an occasional high-rise, meagerly stocked department stores and a string of pizza and chicken joints. Their greasy fumes mix with the smells of diesel and dirt.

Foreigners are a rarity on Lusaka streets and are viewed by these desperate children as walking bags of cash. The presence of a foreign reporter and a woman from the Dutch embassy escalates the nighttime frenzy on Cairo Road.

"Please madame, please madame, give me money," they cry, with imploring looks that are sometimes practiced, sometimes predatory, but always pitiable.

The teen-agers sniff petrol, aerosol cans, anything to remain numb. Their feet are calloused to rawhide. Their clothes hang from bodies stunted by malnutrition.

Steven Chipili is 13 but looks 8. He is scooping meat and nsima with his fingers. He wears only a dirt-encrusted sweater stretching to his knees.

Something is definitely wrong with him.

He wallows on the median strip, laughing demonically, as if possessed, at images only he sees. According to Mwewa, Steven was perfectly normal before he ran from police who tried to shake him down for a pocketful of panhandled money.

He was beaten, kicked and left in the street. Mwewa found him the next day and took him to the hospital. That was a few months ago. "The boy has not been right since," Mwewa says.

Last year, in the northern Copperbelt, where the mines are giving out and thousands are jobless, Steven's parents died of AIDS within four months of each other. He had no one else. So he hopped a freight train to Lusaka. More children arrive each day and quickly learn to survive on charity, thievery and prostitution. Girls and boys who should be in grade school sell their small bodies in order to eat.

Winter is approaching in the Southern Hemisphere, and on Cairo Road, the night gets later and chillier. The teen-agers and the younger ones are now a swarming mob. They dart in and out of traffic, then grab Mwewa and surround the embassy worker's car.

"Just go!" screams one of Mwewa's volunteers. Mwewa is stubborn and stays. He fruitlessly tries to calm children who are screaming and tugging at the car doors.

Tyson, a 16-year-old boy nicknamed for the power of his punch, flails and cries in pain. His jaw is swollen to the size of a lemon and he wants a dentist. Now.

"Tomorrow," Mwewa says, trying to reason with a violent drunk.

"Tomorrow I will take you to the dentist."

Days later, Tyson is dead. The TV news reports that a security guard unleashed his dog on the boy while he was begging in front of a chicken restaurant. Tyson ran onto Cairo Road and into the path of a minibus. Mwewa spends 1.4 million kwacha on the funeral, about $600. Most of it comes from a Canadian relief organization donation.

Wouldn't that money better serve the living?

"What am I supposed to do?" he says. "It is our culture to give a good funeral."

Mwewa directs Fountain of Hope, a grassroots relief agency that barely lives up to its name. If current infection rates continue, the numbers of dead mothers and fathers will increase for at least 20 years, say international aid groups.

Average life expectancy here has plummeted from 56 to 37 years, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. About 20 percent of the population -- an estimated one in five adults -- is infected. The American rate is 0.57 percent.

Mwewa has a geology degree and used to work in the copper mines, once the backbone of the economy. "The chemicals were making me sick," he says, and so he quit. He turned to this work, compelled by what he saw on the streets.

The impoverished government can spend next to nothing on AIDS or its orphans.

It counts on foreign relief agencies to carry an impossible load. Fountain of Hope exists on piecemeal funding from such groups.

It is similar in neighboring Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe. Their struggling governments can't cope with the epidemic's merciless march across southern Africa, where the number of victims is highest.

There are exceptions. In Uganda, a government-funded education program is credited with decreasing infection rates.

Twelve years ago, Zambia's then-president, Kenneth Kaunda, tried to inspire a national campaign against AIDS by disclosing that his own 30-year-old son had died from the disease.

It had little effect. The disease is predominantly spread by heterosexuals and birth control is not embraced here. A family's social standing increases with the number of its children.

Zambia is steeped in tribal taboos and born-again Christianity. Few speak openly of sex or say the virus' name.

In the shantytowns, it is called "the slimming disease." In the villages, it is "this thing that has come."

No one knows how many orphans carry the virus. No one tests them because it would do no good. There is no treatment here. Even AZT, the most basic of AIDS drugs, is unaffordable in a country where $50 a month is considered good pay.

Zambia's few orphanages are full. In the villages, children who have lost their parents and most other relatives are bundled aboard buses to Lusaka. Effectively disowned, they are told to find help in the big city.

"I put this kid on the bus and I say `Go find your uncle.' But where are they going to find this uncle? They don't. He doesn't exist," says Louis Mwewa.

Louis Mwewa, no relation to Rodgers, heads Children in Need, an umbrella network representing the few orphan groups such as Fountain of Hope.

"We have to do something. But even the few of us who do something, we are reduced to beggars. I have to run up and down to get money, and all of us, we're going to the same places," he said.

The government closed Fountain of Hope's drop-in center because of a cholera outbreak. So the group moved into the Kamwala shantytown, where a new school is being built. Rodgers Mwewa needs about $25,000 to finish the building and doesn't have it.

So far, only the foundation has been poured. Classes are held outdoors, on wobbling benches that tip every five minutes, dumping their occupants into giggling heaps. Orphans are taught English and rudimentary math on blackboards propped against jacaranda trees. One day, it is hoped, these children will pass the entrance exam for Lusaka schools.

But it will take them years, and Zambian schools are not free. Costs range from $10 a year for the younger ones to about $30 for the oldest. Fountain of Hope also tries, diplomatically, to teach children about safe sex. Instructors use soda bottles to demonstrate how to use a condom. But, said teacher Brian Mulenga, the lectures don't go far with 8-year-old boy prostitutes.

"Why don't they make condoms for children?" the youngsters inquire.

"They are too big and they fall off." Mulenga laughs, then snaps into seriousness.

"They really asked this," he said.

Catherine Phiri, 8, has lost both parents to AIDS. She lives in Kamwala with a charity woman who takes in orphans. She has no brothers or sisters. She doesn't even remember how she got here.

For days, she wears the same filthy blue sweater. She trudges to school on a dirt path, her bare feet sending up small clouds of dust. Always, she must pass the whitewashed concrete hut where a radio blasts South African music and leering men without jobs drink the day away.

At the school grounds, Rodgers Mwewa translates Catherine's mumbled answers in Nyanga, one of Zambia's prevailing tribal tongues. It is difficult to pull an answer or a smile from this girl. Her tiny face is hard as flint.

What does she want to be when she grows up?

She hangs her head and plucks weeds from the ground. Mwewa asks again. Finally, in a voice barely audible, she answers.

Mwewa's face is clouded by defeat.

"She wants to be a cleaning woman," he says.

Just outside Lusaka, in the slums of Matero, local women banded together in 1991 to help an ever-increasing number of orphans. They named themselves Kwasha Mukwenu, which means "help your friend." They have registered more than 2,000 orphans, but can only feed about 100 a day. The women also clothe and send some of these children to school with money badgered from relief agencies and raised by selling baked goods and batik cloth.

Under the leadership of Elizabeth Ngoma, a large woman with an infectious laugh, Kwasha Mukwenu tries to find homes for the orphans, either with distant relatives or families willing to take in strays. In some houses, grandmothers care for as many as 17 children.

For most of these children, the meal eaten here is their only one of the day.

As in every shantytown, the people of Matero walk. Cars are unaffordable. So the arrival of a truck draws a crowd.

Inside the Catholic church, some 60 children sit quietly on straw mats, balancing green plastic plates laden with nsima by the women of Kwasha Mukwenu. The youngsters smile and shyly wave, but never stop chewing.

Emanuel Daka, 14, lives in a nearby house with his mother, brother and sister. His father is dead of AIDS. His mother is dying of tuberculosis, one of Africa's most common opportunistic infections from HIV.

He is in sixth grade. English is his favorite subject, though he cannot speak it yet. He dreams of being a priest.

"I want to preach and tell the people the truth about these people who are dying of AIDS," he says through an interpreter.

He is asked how he lives with the knowledge that his mother will soon die. He stares at the floor. Minutes pass. "I feel very bad," he answers flatly. "I am going to be left alone."

He is surrounded by the Kwasha Mukwenu women, who nod and continue talking and laughing. Death is nothing new. The women produce receipts for medicine to document their work. They need more money, they say. They cannot help every child.

Suddenly, one of them gasps. "Oh," she cries. "Look at him."

Tears are streaming down Emanuel's face. The thought of his mother's death has overwhelmed him.

Mulenga Kapwebwe sees children like Emanuel every day. She is the daughter of Zambia's first vice president and a worker with California-based Project Concern International. It teaches Fountain of Hope the Byzantine skills of writing grant applications and soliciting donors.

In her world, 5-year-olds have sexually transmitted diseases. If a man will pay more for sex without a condom, so be it. The child must eat today. Tomorrow has not arrived.

"There is no age of innocence anymore," she says. "You have to get used to certain things."

Three days later, on a beautiful evening just before sunset, Rodgers Mwewa walks into a backyard party attended by international relief workers. There is a buffet, an open bar, soft music and polite conversation. Mwewa has come straight from Fountain of Hope, where his long, depressing day ended with the arrival of a raped little girl.

Falling apart over each injustice does no good. Mwewa can do nothing more for the girl until tomorrow. To do this work requires not only compassion, but also the ability to turn it off.

He looks toward the bar and covets the numbing effect of a stiff drink. The 8-year-old orphan stumbled into Fountain of Hope as he was leaving. She was attacked in daylight while walking alone in Kamwala. Mwewa and his volunteers cleaned her up. She was taken to the hospital.

Now he struggles to shake her image. One detail refuses to budge.

"She had blood running down her leg," he says in a soft voice that is swallowed up by party chatter.
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