San Francisco Chronicle - Thursday, July 11, 2002
Gavin du Venage, Chronicle Foreign Service

The girls' mother died in 1999, a victim of the rampant AIDS epidemic sweeping through southern Africa. For three years, Liza Radebe, a single mother, had faithfully paid the monthly mortgage on the $4,000 house she had purchased in 1996. Now her children, bereft of their mother, are AIDS orphans, occupying a house that the bank wants back.

"We are coming across more and more households where the original mortgage holders have died from AIDS, leaving their children behind," said Andries Mangkokwana, a community development officer for Servcon, a nonprofit joint venture between private banks and the government aimed at mediating between mortgage defaulters and lending institutions.

"The banks are left with an unpaid debt and the children without a home," said Mangkokwana. "We are caught in the middle."

South Africa is hardly alone in facing such wrenching ramifications of the AIDS pandemic. There are an estimated 13.4 million children in the developing world who have lost at least one parent to AIDS, according to a report released Wednesday at the international AIDS conference in Barcelona. That number will double, to 25 million, within the next eight years, says the study.

"This is without doubt one of the most shocking reports that has been released at this conference," Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of the U.N. AIDS agency, told reporters. "AIDS has created an orphans' crisis."

Originally established in the mid-90s to find less expensive homes for people who lose their jobs and can no longer afford their home loan payments, Servcon now finds itself dealing with an increasing number of such AIDS orphans.

CHILDREN DON'T QUALIFY FOR LOANS

The Radebe sisters' elderly aunt, Nomvula Radebe, has moved in to care for the children but because she is unemployed, she is unable to get a mortgage of her own. As minors, the children are also ineligible for loans.

It is only a matter of time before a truckload of security guards and a court sheriff arrive to remove the Radebes from the house and put them on the street.

Their plight is yet another of the ever-widening consequences of South Africa's HIV crisis. Five million people -- more than 10 percent of the population -- are currently infected, and AIDS is expected to kill 6 million people before 2010, leaving countless numbers of children behind.

"Hundreds of thousands of children have lost their parents already, and with millions of adults expected to die in the future, we are sitting on a crisis of staggering size," said Sonja Giese, an academic who has just completed a study of AIDS orphans for the United Nations Children's Fund, or UNICEF.

Giese says up to 800,000 children in South Africa have lost both their parents or their sole known parent -- usually their mother -- to AIDS. By 2005,

that figure is expected to reach 1 million, climbing as high as 3 million by 2010.

17 PERCENT ORPHAN RATE

"In developing countries, the norm is for about 2 percent of children to be classed as orphans," said Giese. "In South Africa, that figure is more like 17 percent."

Social workers are struggling to keep up with the wave of young victims.

"Some orphans continue to go to school even after their parents die, which means we can keep track of them and provide them with assistance," said Minnie Themba, a community worker and AIDS counselor in Vosloorus township, where the Radebes live. "Many others drop out, and when they do, they disappear."

Themba says relatives are often reluctant to take in the children of AIDS victims because of the stigma attached to the disease, even in a country where 20 percent of all adults are infected with HIV. "They have no one to take care of them," she said. "This means they get no schooling, basic nutrition or hygiene."

Government officials concede that they are overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem. As the adult population drops, some fear a "Mad Max"-style future with teenage gangs roaming the streets in hard-hit cities.

The country's richest province, Gauteng, plans to set aside $30 million to provide for orphans, to be used as a $45-per-month grant for foster parents who take in children. However, neither the federal government nor other provinces have yet to come up with any strategy for helping the orphans themselves.

AVOIDING AN 'AIDS ELITE'

And even proposed solutions such as providing child-care grants can carry negative consequences. In a country where unemployment and poverty are rife, singling out AIDS orphans for special treatment could lead to increased resentment among others.

"We don't want to create an AIDS elite," said Mangkokwana. "What we need is for government to come up with policies that provide for orphans across the board, irrespective of whether they are orphaned through HIV or TB or whatever. "

In the meantime, banks are having to devise their own strategies.

"We try not to evict where possible," said Eugene Drotskie, manager of Nedcor Legal Recoveries, one of the country's biggest mortgage lenders, which holds home loans of around $3 billion. "It happens that a mortgage holder may be terminally ill, aged or permanently disabled. In those cases, we sometimes write off the loan or downsize the client to cheaper accommodation."

But Drotskie concedes that all too often, the plight of these households falls through the cracks. Lower-level bank officials are either unsympathetic or are not trained to deal with orphaned families. In the case of the Radebes, whose mortgage is held by rival Absa Bank, the elderly aunt does not understand that the bank actually owns the house until the mortgage is paid up.

"Orphans do not know how to talk to a bank," said Mangkokwana. "The Radebes' aunt is uneducated, and she does not grasp the legal position the household is in. She believes that because her sister is dead, the bank will simply go away and stop bothering them."

ADDRESSING AIDS, NOT ORPHANS

Analysts say the long-term solution lies in addressing the wider problems of HIV infection and AIDS treatment.

A good start, says Giese, would be to provide more anti-retroviral medications to control AIDS symptoms and extend lives, something the South African government has been reluctant to do because of the enormous costs of treating so many infected people.

A report released in May by the Medical Research Council, a private South African group, found that such medications could reduce by half the number of AIDS orphans in the nation.

"If the parents stay alive, you won't have as many orphans," Giese said.
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