MARY’S MEALS ON A
A million people are living with HIV in Malawi. 170,000 of them are under 14. The country is home to thousands upon thousands of AIDS orphans as the pandemic wreaks havoc. Record reporter MARK McGIVERN follows Scottish charity Mary’s Meals as they help k
ON the day he was told the results of an HIV test were negative, Vincent Chikeweze would have been entitled to feel relieved.
But he’s only four and oblivious to his good fortune.
Besides, it was the same day that Vincent and his sister Sosten, eight, were told that his mother Christina had died of AIDS.
It was only on his visit to hospital for his test results that doctors told him his mother had passed away.
She was another victim of the AIDS pandemic that has killed 50,000 people in Malawi in recent years.
Vincent’s news came on the day the Record visited his village with Scottish charity Mary’s Meals to see their food aid programme in action.
A million people, more than 10 per cent of Malawi’s population, are living with HIV, the virus that leads to the killer disease. More than 170,000 are children under the age of 14.
More than 100,000 of the kids fed daily in Malawi by Mary’s Meals are, like Vincent, AIDS orphans. Most live in rural areas.
Vincent is now looked after by his grandmother Ellen Chikeweze, 63, along with three brothers and sisters and two cousins. His aunt also died from AIDS.
They live in Ndalama, a typical poor village of tin-roofed huts, where Mary’s Meals provide food to a school and Under Six centre.
Ellen said she could not tell her grandson his mother had died in December. The boy had been badly affected when she was taken to hospital. He has barely spoken since and only recently began to smile again.
Ellen said: “In Malawi, it is not for the grandmother to tell a boy like Vincent that his mother is dead.
“People in the village told him that but I said she was in hospital and she would come back.”
It was only when Vincent went to hospital that the truth came out. Ellen said: “He was asking doctors where his mother was. “Vincent has taken the death of his mother very badly. I think now he is understanding it.
“He is a very sad boy and you can see that in his eyes. He is not like his brothers and sisters.”
Mary’s Meals’ intervention at the Under Six centre and the free school is a lifeline for her family. She said: “I send the children because if I did not, I would not know if they would be fed.
“They will all go to primary school but I have no money to send them to secondary school.
“I worry that they will become thieves because they will find it hard to find enough money for food.”
Ellen is too old to find work in the nearby tea estates, which pay 750 Kwacha – about £1 – a day for piece work. Job opportunities are scarce and there is little chance of the kids getting proper work.
In Malawi, each family knows how hunger progresses – beginning with low energy and motivation and developing to sleepiness and serious illness.
And Marie Da Silva knows all about the devastation caused by AIDS. She lost 15 relatives in the epidemic, including her father and her two brothers.
Marie worked as a nanny in the US for 19 years and returned home to Malawi, where her own loss inspired her in 2002 to open the Jacaranda School for Orphans in Limbe, beside Blantyre. It took over her own home.
She said: “We have 428 children at Jacaranda and 98 per cent of them are AIDS orphans. It sounds disturbing but that is the reality we face. “Seventy-two have HIV but we try to give everyone the most normal lives they can have.” Marie set up her school in the same year Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow opened his first Mary’s Meals kitchen in a Malawi school.
She struggled for years to feed and
Children who receive HIV medicine on empty stomachs do not get the benefit