The Miami Herald, Inc.; Monday, May 26, 1997
Katherine Ellison; Herald Staff Writer

The six-foot former model once strode runways in them, in her heady years of French champagne and serial marriages.

Now she changes 80 diapers a day.

Her hands are chapped from giving baths, her long blond hair is brittle, and her blouse, lacking a button, falls open.

"I'm happy," she says. "I've never been so happy."

At the age of 50, Boguzinskas has surrendered to the masochistic passion of devout motherhood, but there's a catch. Judges keep sending her babies, yet she can't find people to help care for them.

The government hasn't responded. Private groups give funds and food, but no people. Boguzinskas is alone for long stretches in the seven-bedroom house, filled with her crying, biting, scrambling brood, ages four months to seven years, and her happiness, increasingly, is mixed with desperation.

"She has told me 100 times that she will kill herself," says Natasha Smit de Barros, a Dutch volunteer who comes Tuesdays and Thursdays. "She says she'll go jump off a building in New York to show everyone what's happening in Brazil."

Growing problem

Part of what's happening is an alarming expansion of the number of AIDS orphans.

As of last year, 13,000 Brazilian babies and children were known to have lost their mothers to AIDS: a 23 percent increase over 1995, according to a new study by the Brazilian chapter of the Boston-based Global Orphan Project. Eight percent, or 1,040, of them are believed to be HIV-positive.

Miguel Fontes, the study's author, said Brazil's proportion of AIDS orphans is lower than Africa's but higher than anywhere else in this hemisphere, including the United States.

That's true, he said -- despite the higher U.S. incidence of AIDS in general -- because Brazilian mothers with AIDS tend to live fewer years, due to the relatively poor health care available. (Brazil's number of AIDS orphans is probably also higher than Fontes' study shows, because of greater problems here in keeping track of the poor, who account for most of the AIDS cases.)

Many of Brazil's AIDS orphans, especially those who themselves are infected, end up abandoned in hospitals or in the street. Government orphanages don't accept children with AIDS, and established private agencies are becoming overbooked.

Boguzinskas' living room looks and sounds like the center of this storm.

Two-year-old Mariana, whose crack-addicted mother threw her out a hospital window -- to be caught by a nurse -- is banging a pink plastic guitar against the side of her playpen.

Nine-month-old Alzira, whose mother tried to strangle her, is giggling in Smit's lap; she still can't sit up by herself.

Chubby, 1-year-old Paloma is dashing to and fro in her walker. Her mother dropped her off six months ago, promising to return. Paloma is fed through a catheter plugged into her stomach. Boguzinskas frets that she isn't trained to change it, but the plug is becoming infected.

The other side of life

Boguzinskas' life changed after she almost lost it. In 1978, while working as a fashion-show producer, she was diagnosed with cancer of the uterus. First her hair went, then her husband. Then she met Little Bean.

She was visiting a friend at a hospital, she says, when the elevator stopped at the wrong floor. There, she spotted a newborn in an incubator. Doctors called him Feijaozinho, Little Bean. He had been found in a box under a bridge, HIV-positive and nearly dead.

Boguzinskas went to a judge the next day and took him home the same week.

She had, by then, already quit her job and was volunteering several hours each week to help children with cancer and AIDS. "The children gave me the strength to get through the chemotherapy," she said. "I had been a very vain woman, with gorgeous hair, before then, but then I saw the other side of life."

And so, as she took Little Bean home, Boguzinskas had an inspiration.

"What do you say we take all the AIDS kids off the street?" she whispered in the baby's ear.

`All of us were rejects'

She approached an old acquaintance, the owner of a large electronics company, and won his patronage, although he insisted on anonymity. In 1992, she moved into the mansion, her sponsor paying for the rent plus a nurse and other assistants. Her cancer went into remission, but her sponsor, in 1994, died in a helicopter crash, leaving her on her own.

She has, since then, sold jewels and a car to pay for some expenses. But she lost the assistants, and eventually ran up a $50,000 debt to her landlord. Finally, early this year, after heavy rains flooded the mansion and Boguzinskas called TV reporters to plead for help, representatives from a national charity, the Good Will League, stepped in to take over the rent payments, assume her debts and help repair the roof and walls.

"It's as if this woman came from another world," says Naaman do Valle, a Good Will League official who has been working with her. "She has fantastic strength."

Boguzinskas was once very wealthy, but before that she was poor. She never knew her father, and her Ukrainian immigrant mother "drank, and never liked me anyway." As a child, she was left with her grandmother, and as a teenager, she started working for a beauty salon, where she was soon discovered by a top Brazilian designer of the 1960s.

"Deep down, I identify with these children, since all of us were rejects," she said. But that has made it all the harder to watch them die -- 10 have gone in just the past five years.

Gifts, but no helping hands

Supplies are no problem. The American School provides diapers; the Carrefours chain delivers groceries. The mansion is flooded with gifts of brand new strollers, car seats, cribs, mattresses and stuffed animals.

Nor does Boguzinskas want money. "AIDS is a big industry," she says. "I don't want to get my hands dirty."

Her problem is people, or rather the lack of them. Since the death of her sponsor, Boguzinskas has struggled to find trained assistants, who won't run away for fear of contamination. A team of state hospital doctors sees the children once a week, but Smit, a part-time English teacher, is her only regular volunteer.

The result is that Boguzinskas, who hasn't spent a night away from the children in five years -- and who wakes regularly, twice, before dawn, to give bottles and check foreheads for fevers -- frequently breaks down in tears.

Eighteen of her 20 wards, even the five-year-olds, are still in diapers, for convenience.

Three infants rock in their car seats for long periods upstairs, attended only by a black-and-white TV.

"No one can blame her, because no one, on their own, could do a better job," said Smit, who seems just as serene as Boguzinskas is agitated.

Prayers from the Vatican

Boguzinskas grew hopeful four months ago after Emerson Kapaz, the Sao Paulo state secretary of Science, Technology and Economic Development, watched her TV plea and promised help.

But even though she calls him now, almost every day, Kapaz has not come through. In an interview, he said one of his assistants was trying to register Boguzinskas as a legal institution, making her eligible for government aid.

"We still don't know if it will work," he said.

Boguzinskas is trying to hold on, but she has grown skeptical, and very, very tense.

Another baby arrived at the mansion recently, a one-month-old girl without a name, whose mother, a maid, already has two other children with AIDS.

A couple of weeks ago, after being on her own for more than 48 hours, Boguzinskas called Smit at home.

"Call the pope!" she said.

After only a little hesitation, Smit put the call through, reaching a Vatican secretary.

"She told me: We can just pray for her," Smit said.

CAPTION: photo: Sonia Boguzinskas cares for AIDS orphans in Brazil (a), Sonia Boguzinskas feeds one of her adopted AIDS orphan in Brazil (a)

KATHERINE ELLISON / Herald staff GIVING HOPE: Sonia Boguzinskas cares for 20 AIDS orphans in Brazil. `The children gave me the strength to get through the chemotherapy,' says the former model whose cancer is in remission. The increasing number of her charges has left her begging for help.

KATHERINE ELLISON / Herald staff A HELPING HAND: Her first adoptee inspired Sonia Boguzinskas to ask `What do you say we take all the AIDS kids off the street?'

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