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They work, care for the sick and are even abused.

by Ruth Ansah Ayisi

“I never want to get married nor have children,” whispered 17-year-old Elizabeth Chikwama, looking down at the mat she sat on outside her rural homestead in Shopo village of Mazoe district, some 150 kilometres north east of the Zimbabwean capital, Harare.

Elizabeth has already had plenty of experience looking after a family. Since the age of 14, when HIV/AIDS claimed the life of her father, she has headed her household. Elizabeth’s mother had died of HIV/AIDS earlier when she was just 10 years old.

Today that household headed by Elizabeth consists of 15 people, 13 of whom are orphans and two of whom are adults, one is her sick, HIV-positive aunt and the other her frail, elderly grandmother. Her aunt’s son, one and half year-old Darlington, also requires a lot of attention. He is HIV positive and is too weak to crawl let alone walk. He struggles to breathe and has skin rashes.

Elizabeth still manages to attend school— albeit without schoolbooks and often on an empty stomach. It is a one-hour trek to the school. That is after she performs household chores. As the eldest female orphan, she takes on most of the cooking, cleaning and caring for everyone.

Her emaciated aunt, 30-year-old Ellen Chikwama, who sat beside Elizabeth, glanced tenderly at her. “Elizabeth looks after all of us now. I’m too sick and her grandmother is too old. She even has to bath me,” said Chikwama, coughing and letting out an embarrassed laugh. The aunt suffers from tuberculosis, painful boils, and severe diarrhoea, which have reduced her from a plump woman of over 80 kilogrammes to a frail 50 kilogrammes.

She came to live with her orphaned nieces and nephews following the death of her husband, a long-distance bus driver, from HIV/AIDS one year ago. Ellen Chikwama fell sick soon after.

The extended family used to survive off their plot of maize and the meagre income the orphaned nieces and nephews used to earn from selling their labour at the weekends. Elizabeth had worked each Saturday from sunrise to sunset following the death of her father when she was 14. Most of the labour was on farms in the district, manually weeding, planting and harvesting.  Sometimes she walked up to five kilometres to reach the farm before starting the strenuous day’s work.

She earned a paltry salary on completion of the farm work. In Shona, the local language, she explained how she often stood as she ate a small bowl of sadza made from maize meal for lunch so that she could get the work done in time. “Sometimes they didn’t give us food and I worked all day without eating,” said Elizabeth. Asked what she did when she felt tired, she explained shyly, “If I sat down long I didn’t get the work done and sometimes the boss shouted.”

At the end of each day, the seven orphaned girls huddle together to sleep on a plastic sack under one threadbare blanket on the stone floor of a hut, used in the day as a kitchen. The orphaned boys sleep in another hut in similarly drab conditions.

Elizabeth is typical of many children in Zimbabwe, who are bearing the brunt of the various disasters befalling the country, once the breadbasket of southern African.

These disasters include the devastating HIV/AIDS epidemic. About 25.06 per cent of the adult population lives with HIV/AIDS, which has left an estimated 600,000 orphans. The economy has plummeted and inflation has shot up while social services are dwindling.  And the effects of a drought this year have pushed many Zimbabweans, especially the children and women, to the brink of survival.

 “Children in Zimbabwe are increasingly at risk,” said UNICEF Representative in Zimbabwe, Dr. Festo Kavishe. “More young girls are turning to prostitution.  There are stories of families encouraging their children aged 12-16 to engage in prostitution in exchange for a bag of maize, and more children are taking to the streets.”

Tsitsi Tigere, a member of the Zimbabwe National Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS, who works in Mazoe district and also visits the Chikwama family of orphans, said, “Children are no longer children. When their parents die, I see plenty cases of children being pulled out of school and abused sexually. Even girls under five, are abused sexually by older men. They believe that they will be cured of HIV if they have sex with a child, who they believe is HIV negative.”

“The challenge is to make sure the best interest of each child is taken into consideration,” said Dr. Kavishe.

But with communities so desperate, the children are likely to suffer even with all these good intentions unless their desperate situation eases.

It has been a feat that Elizabeth Chikwama, except for one term when she suffered TB, has never missed school. She is now in form three of secondary school and her favourite subject, she said, is maths.

Yet, the family’s situation is becoming more precarious. Now Ellen Chikwama cannot even afford the bus fare to make the 50-kilometre journey to the nearest hospital.

The hospital that provides home-based care for the 200 people sick with HIV/AIDS in the surrounding area, including to Chikwama, has cut back its assistance due to lack of funds.

“Most of the funds are for prevention not for those who are already infected with HIV,” said the hospital matron, Teresa Maniwe. For example, if we had enough money we would like to provide the sick with mattresses, because it is very uncomfortable sleeping on the floor with sores and boils and when you’re so thin. We also don’t provide them with soap anymore. Even for me who is working, soap is difficult to afford these days. Imagine for those sick with HIV/AIDS, they need soap more than I do. Many of them are incontinent.”

However, the hospital’s home-based care programme has managed to continue to supply peanut butter to give some protein to the patients’ diets, and disinfectant. They also continue to offer counselling and morale support.

Asked about the future, the ailing aunt, Ellen Chikwama, said that she is worried about Elizabeth and her other nieces and nephews. “I’m scared for their future. Their grandmother keeps them together in her own home. Once she dies, the children will be on the street. Who will keep them then? I’m so sick. I don’t know when I will die.”