AIDS orphans left in care of grandparents

S. Africa makes progress in HIV fight

NYUMBANI, Kenya, Dec 1, (AP): There are no middle-aged people in Nyumbani. They all died years ago, before this village of hope in Kenya began. Only the young and old live here.

Nyumbani was born of the AIDS crisis. The 938 children here all saw their parents die. The 97 grandparents — eight grandfathers among them — saw their middle-aged children die. But put together, the bookend generations take care of one another.

Saturday is World AIDS Day, but the executive director of the aid group Nyumbani, which oversees the village of the same name, hates the name which is given to the day because for her the word AIDS is so freighted with doom and death. These days, it doesn’t necessarily mean a death sentence. Millions live with the virus with the help of anti-retroviral drugs, or ARVs. And the village she runs is an example of that.

“AIDS is not a word that we should be using. At the beginning when we came up against HIV, it was a terminal disease and people were presenting at the last phase, which we call AIDS,” said Sister Mary Owens. “There is no known limit to the lifespan now so that word AIDS should not be used. So I hate World AIDS Day, follow? Because we have moved beyond talking about AIDS, the terminal stage. None of our children are in the terminal stage.”

In the village, each grandparent is charged with caring for about a dozen “grandchildren,” one or two of whom will be biological family. That responsibility has been a life-changer for Janet Kitheka, who lost one daughter to AIDS in 2003. Another daughter died from cancer in 2004. A son died in a tree-cutting accident in 2006 and the 63-year-old lost two grandchildren in 2007, including one from AIDS.

“When I came here I was released from the grief because I am always busy instead of thinking about the dead,” said Kitheka. “Now I am thinking about building a new house with 12 children. They are orphans. I said to myself, ‘Think about the living ones now.’ I’m very happy because of the children.”

As she walks around Nyumbani, which is three hours’ drive east of Nairobi, 73-year-old Sister Mary is greeted like a rock star by little girls in matching colorful school uniforms. Children run and play, and sleep in bunk beds inside mud-brick homes. High schoolers study carpentry or tailoring. But before 2006, this village did not exist, not until a Catholic charity petitioned the Kenyan government for land on which to house orphans.

Drugs

Everyone here has been touched by HIV or AIDS. But only 80 children have HIV and thanks to antiretroviral drugs, none of them has AIDS.

“They can dream their dreams and live a long life,” Owens said.

Nyumbani relies heavily on US funds but it is aiming to be self-sustaining.

Also: JOHANNESBURG: In the early 90s when South Africa’s Themba Lethu clinic could only treat HIV/AIDS patients for opportunistic diseases, many would come in on wheelchairs and keep coming to the health center until they died.

Two decades later the clinic is the biggest ARV (anti-retroviral) treatment center in the country and sees between 600 to 800 patients a day from all over southern Africa. Those who are brought in on wheelchairs, sometimes on the brink of death, get the crucial drugs and often become healthy and are walking within weeks.

“The ARVs are called the ‘Lazarus BUCHA, Ukraine, Dec 1, (AP): Andrei Mandrykin, an inmate at Prison No. 85 outside Kiev, has HIV. He looks ghostly and much older than his 35 years. But Mandrykin is better off than tens of thousands of his countrymen, because is he receiving treatment amid what the World Health Organization says is the worst AIDS epidemic in Europe.

Ahead of World AIDS Day on Saturday, international organizations have urged the Ukrainian government to increase funding for treatment and do more to prevent HIV from spreading from high-risk groups into the mainstream population, where it is even harder to manage and control.

An estimated 230,000 Ukrainians, or about 0.8 percent of people aged 15 to 49, are living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Some 120,000 are in urgent need of anti-retroviral therapy, which can greatly prolong and improve the quality of their lives. But due to a lack of funds, fewer than a quarter are receiving the drugs — one of the lowest levels in the world.

Ukraine’s AIDS epidemic is still concentrated among high-risk groups such as intravenous drug users, sex workers, homosexuals and prisoners. But nearly half of new cases registered last year were traced to unprotected heterosexual contact.

“Slowly but surely the epidemic is moving from the most-at-risk, vulnerable population to the general population,” said Nicolas Cantau of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, who manages work in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. “For the moment there is not enough treatment in Ukraine.”

Stigma is also a big problem for those with HIV in Ukraine. Liliya, a 65-year-old woman who would give only her first name, recently attended a class on how to tell her 9-year-old great-granddaughter that she has HIV. drug’ because people rise up and walk,” said Sue Roberts who has been a nurse at the clinic , run by Right to Care in Johannesburg’s Helen Joseph Hospital, since it opened its doors in 1992.