Village in Africa uplifts AIDS orphans

I woke up with a gentle breeze and kind thoughts, then I read the morning headlines: "Hollywood Starlet Robbed in SoHo Penthouse, $13,000 Handbag and More Stolen." My mood was instantaneously befouled. Why does anyone need, want or aspire to possess a $13,000 handbag?

It is obscene, nauseating and a clear sign that we are a society approaching the tipping point of excess, after which we will be incapable of redemption.

Several years ago I returned to Malawi, the land of my Peace Corps experience. The country had changed little. It remains a nation plagued by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — war, famine, pestilence and death — with AIDS now wickedly superimposed.

I recall being in a village talking with a grandmother, old, frail and in poor health, who was struggling to care for 13 children — the children of her own children who had all fallen to AIDS. In Malawi, a country of 12 million, an estimated 17 percent of the sexually active population is HIV-positive.

The estimated number of orphans is 800,000.

Meet Mr. Sibale. Years ago, when the severity of AIDS was still underestimated by many, this Malawian vowed to act. He turned to friends, those who had experienced the warmth of his country during their Peace Corps days, and asked for help. From this, a unique partnership was born.

His creation, the Malawi Children's Village just celebrated its first decade of caring for children who lost their parents to AIDS.

Serving more than 3,200 orphans and vulnerable children in 37 villages, MCV is designed to prove that the traditional extended family is still alive in Malawi.

Instead of placing children in orphanages, relatives get the support they need to care for their own. In Africa, many mothers, especially those at the end their battle with AIDS, die in childbirth. Their children, weak and afflicted with HIV in about 30 percent of cases, are extremely vulnerable.

Sibale's first step was to open a nutritional rehabilitation center with full-time caretakers, plus food and medicine to restore these children to health and allow them to return to their villages when they're strong enough. To date, more than 200 infants are thriving back in their own extended families.

But, for Sibale's children, mere survival is not sufficient. MCV combines ongoing community AIDS education with a commitment to provide each orphan the education he or she needs to prosper into adult life. Younger children are provided clothes, books and pencils to attend one of Malawi's free primary schools. Upon completing primary school, the program traditionally provided each orphan the tuition to attend a boarding secondary school. Recently, recognizing the deterioration in education resulting from the loss of so many teachers to AIDS, MCV opened its own secondary school, Gracious Academy, providing quality secondary education to more than 400 students.

Sadly, in Africa the reality is that only one child in 10 who starts primary school will make it to secondary school. For the other 90 percent, MCV's vocational training provides orphans training in tailoring, computer technology, building trades, carpentry, irrigation and automobile mechanics.

In addition, income-generating innovations such as maize mills, fish farms and sewing projects have been the route by which MCV has helped villages to protect the well-being of their most vulnerable children.

In the end, one large community in Africa has ceased to view itself as helpless. Villagers there have discovered they can work together. And this is taking place in a setting where half of Sibale's children are Muslims and half are Christians. Equally impressive is that the cost of caring for an orphan at MCV is just below $28 a year. Divide that into the cost of a starlet's purse to see how many orphans it could support.

Denny, of Canandaigua, is a child psychiatrist, former Peace Corps volunteer and past president, Malawi Children's Village.