Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2005. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
BBC News - December 21, 2005
Eight-month-old Thalenthe was abandoned by his mother weeks after he was born.
His ailing grandfather could not take care of him and brought him to Ithemba Lethu: a transit shelter for abandoned children in the city of Durban.
Children like Thalenthe are part of the trail of devastation left behind by the HIV-Aids pandemic ravaging the country.
In KwaZulu-Natal, the province with the highest infection rate in South Africa, 40% of women test positive at the government's ante-natal clinics.
Some of the children who arrive on Ithamba Lethu's doorstep are HIV positive.
Here they don't only get shelter, food and love - they also receive breast milk from a network of volunteer mothers who express extra milk every day.
The milk is then collected and sent out to homes like Ithemba Lethu.
Benefits
Project co-ordinator Penny Reimers says the advantages of breast milk have been proved by a World Health Organisation study.
"The WHO did a study of children in developing countries and they found that children who are not breast fed are six times more likely to die from diarrhoea and pneumonia - it's literally life saying," she says.
"The studies they have done in relation to HIV show that if a child is exclusively breast fed for six months - that means no other formula or water - these babies have a very low chance of contracting the HIV virus."
Penny Reimers says volunteer mothers are rigorously screened before contributing the milk, to avoid HIV from being transmitted through the milk.
"In donor banks internationally they do blood tests on the mothers - we don't have the funding to do that so we screen by lifestyle," she says.
"Then we pasteurise the breast milk to kill off any HIV, hepatitis virus or bacteria that might be in the milk."
Compassion
The breast milk project is the brain child of paediatrician Professor Anna Coustodis, who with her friends wanted to lend a hand in the fight against Aids.
The project has grown through word of mouth, over the last four years, and more than 100 mothers have become a part of it.
Andrea Muller, 33, provides just over 500 millilitres of milk every week.
"As a South African, Aids is very close to everyone's heart and everyone wants to do something to help - without giving money perhaps. It seemed something that would be easy to do to help babies - and having a little one gives one a very soft heart."
That kind of compassion is urgently needed in a country where poverty and disease have driven some mothers to desperation.
"There are a lot of children abandoned,or just left", says Liz Holley, the house mother at Ithemba Lethu.
"One of our little girls was left in a room. Then the neighbours could see no-one was going in but could still hear the baby crying. They broke the door down and got the child out.
"Many of the women are desperate, they don't know what to do. Families refuse to help because it's HIV-related and they don't know what to do with the children."
Ithemba Lethu is Zulu for "I have a destiny". By coming here, children like Thalenthe have a chance of realising theirs.
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