At 12, a Mother of Two - New York Times
The New York Times

May 28, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

At 12, a Mother of Two
By
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

MHLATUZE, Swaziland

We're now marking the 25th anniversary of the detection of AIDS, and it has
been a sad chapter in the history of humanity. It's been a quarter-century
of
self-delusion, dithering and failure at every level.

In America, we may think of AIDS as something that is behind us, but this
year it will kill almost three million people worldwide. And a new victim is
still
being infected every eight seconds.

Southern Africa is becoming the land of orphans, kids like Nomzamo Ngubeni,
a fifth grader who is now the head of her household.

Nomzamo is 12, a soft-spoken schoolgirl with close-cropped hair here in
central Swaziland, the country with the highest H.I.V. infection rate in the
world.
Two out of five adults here have the virus, and very few get the
antiretroviral medicines that can save their lives.

Although Nomzamo probably does not have the virus (although it's hard to be
sure because she's never been tested for it), her life is entirely framed by
the epidemic. Her parents both died of AIDS, so she and her two younger
sisters moved in with an aunt - only to find that the aunt was dying of AIDS
as
well.

Nomzamo nursed the aunt for months and buried her last year. So at the age
of 11, she found herself in charge of the family and its thatch-roofed hut,
which
has no electricity or running water. She is now both mother and father to
her little sisters, Nokwanda, 9, and Temhlanga, 7.

She wakes them up in the morning to go to school, and forces them to take
their baths and do their homework. She washes their clothes and cuts their
hair.
She consoles them when they miss their parents. When they misbehave, she
beats them. She fetches water and firewood, and in the evenings she cooks
for
them - if there is food.

"If there is no food, then we just go to sleep with nothing," Nomzamo
explains. "The kids don't cry. They just go to sleep."

If all of this seems too much for a 12-year-old, it is. The stress is
wearing her down and causing her to do poorly in school.

Like many households in southern Africa, this family no longer has any
able-bodied person to till the ground, so the family's land lies fallow.
These sisters
get one good meal each day - at school, supplied by the World Food Program -
and they beg or borrow the rest.

There are indeed some heroes in the AIDS saga, including American nuns, the
Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, known as the Cabrini Sisters (
www.cabrinifoundation.org).
Nuns like Sister Barbara Staley, originally from Pennsylvania, live in this
remote pocket of Swaziland and look after the flotsam of the AIDS crisis.
With
help from CARE, the sisters shelter and school many of the orphans; they pay
the fees that allow Nomzamo and her sisters to attend the public school.

But mostly the last quarter-century of AIDS has been a shameful period of
neglect. In the U.S., President Ronald Reagan didn't let the word "AIDS"
slip
past his lips in public until 1987. And nobody behaved more immorally than
the moralizers, people like Patrick Buchanan, who declared in 1983: "The
poor
homosexuals - they have declared war against nature, and now nature is
exacting an awful retribution." The Rev. Jerry Falwell put it this way:
"AIDS is
the wrath of a just God against homosexuals."

In retrospect, the gross immorality of the 1980's wasn't committed in San
Francisco bathhouses, but in the corridors of power by self-righteous
political
and religious leaders whose indifference to the suffering of gays allowed
the epidemic to spread.

Misgovernance has been even worse in Africa. South Africa's president, Thabo
Mbeki, refused for years to address AIDS seriously and is probably
responsible
for more deaths of blacks than any of his white racist predecessors. And
here in Swaziland, the playboy king sets a horrendous example of sexual
excess
by publicly reviewing tens of thousands of bare-breasted teenage virgins so
he can choose new wives for his harem.

There are some signs that leaders around the world have finally been waking
up to the challenge of AIDS in the last few years. Some countries, like
Kenya,
Zimbabwe and China, may have turned the corner. President Bush has vastly
increased the funds for AIDS in Africa.

But the bottom line remains that for the last 25 years, we've faced an
enormous public health challenge - one expected to be comparable to the
mortality
an earlier generation faced from World War II. And in that test, we have
disgraced ourselves.

And that is one reason why, in this forgotten part of Swaziland, a
12-year-old looks old beyond her years.

Possted by Miriam V.