United Press International - November 2, 2002
Beth Potter

He's one of 85 HIV-positive orphans at Nyumbani, an orphanage set up 10 years ago by American priest Angelo D'Agostino.

Since Samuel receives anti-retroviral drugs, new drugs that keep his HIV in remission, doctors and caregivers at the orphanage can't figure out what's wrong with him.

The little boy is exactly what Katalin Szabo, a volunteer lab worker from Cleveland, Ohio, feared before she moved to Kenya about one month ago. Watching Samuel breathe with difficulty and cough as she stayed up with a nurse the last few nights to watch him, made all her fears come back again.

"I was worried about the children when I thought about it in the United States -- that sooner or later, we're going to be faced with the fact that children will die," Szabo says, looking down quickly. "It's heartbreaking."

Fortunately, children at the orphanage are dying a lot less frequently since anti-retroviral drugs were made available. Children used to die at the alarming rate of about one per month, D'Agostino says. In the last two years, since children have started taking the drugs, only two have died.

"At that time, it was pretty depressing, but now we're doing well," D'Agostino says. "Only 30 need medication now."

Other children are now healthy through good eating habits and with volunteers carefully monitoring their immune systems, D'Agostino says.

That's where Szabo and six other American volunteers come in. After graduating from college with a degree in pharmacology, the 28-year-old decided to work in Kenya for a year before going to medical school. She analyzes the blood of the children, looking for hepatitis, low red blood cell counts -- anything that might make them sick.

"Samuel's CD-4 count is below 200. What that means is that he has an immune system that can't function at all," Szabo says.

When D'Agostino started the orphanage, he was one of the first to help HIV-positive children in Kenya. Because of the stigma attached to AIDS, most of the children are shunned by relatives after their parents die. African women who are HIV-positive often abandon their babies, believing that they'll die soon after they're born.

In a strange quirk of fate, three-fourths of the children who initially test HIV-positive, and who have HIV-positive mothers, later turn out to be HIV-negative, D'Agostino says. Szabo also tests the children's blood for that possibility.

D'Agostino estimates there will be 40 million children orphaned by parents who have died of AIDS in the next six to 10 years.

"There are thousands of children being born to HIV parents," D'Agostino says. "What are we going to do? We have orphans and grandparents."

So many parents die in Kenya and other African countries because the cost of anti-retroviral drugs continues to be prohibitive, D'Agostino says. Most people in Kenya make slightly less than $2 per day, but the drugs cost almost $3 per day, he says. That's even after drug companies have offered the life-saving drugs at a discount, D'Agostino says bitterly. He raises money from private donors and public agencies to pay the $250,000 budget needed to take care of all of the children.

But there's still cause for optimism, says Daniel Oliver Beck, 27, another volunteer.

"Nyumbani has done so much for these children," Beck says. "You'd fully expect them not to be with us for much longer, but this gives them a second lease on life."

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