MAGWANGA, South Africa - The seven Malinga children can look outside the door of their mud-walled hut each day and see what AIDS has taken from them.
A mound of red stones with tufts of weeds sprouting from the top marks the resting place of their mother, who died from the disease in June last year. Beside it, there is a second stone pile with a tree branch laid across the top like a bouquet of flowers - to keep the neighbor's goats away. This is the grave of their father, who, frail and feverish, succumbed one afternoon in March to the same AIDS virus that killed his wife.
Today, the children - ages 7 to 20 - find themselves alone, surviving on donated soybeans and cornmeal, scrounging for money to pay school fees, begging for kindness from relatives already taxed by problems of their own.
"There are so many of us. Sometimes we go three days without eating. Then, the younger ones don't go to school because they are hungry," says Tholakele Malinga, the shy 20-year-old daughter in tattered clothes who has been watching over her five younger brothers and one younger sister. In her arms, she cradles the eighth member of their family - her 18-month-old son.
Africa's AIDS crisis is steadily producing a new wave of victims: the orphans left behind in the wake of a virus infecting about 28.5 million people across the continent.
Here in the rugged green hills of South Africa's KwaZulu Natal province, one in three adults is infected with the human immunodeficiency virus. But the number of dead and dying is just one measure of the epidemic's destruction. Acquired immune deficiency syndrome has other faces: It is the disease that orphans children, that burdens grandparents and relatives with clothing and feeding them, and that is sinking the entire community into deeper poverty.
Worldwide, more than 14 million children under the age of 15 have lost one or both parents to AIDS, according to the latest United Nations statistics. Of those, 11 million live in sub-Saharan Africa. But staggering as the numbers are, most governments have failed to recognize or respond to the crisis, health officials say.
"Children fall off the political table more than any other item. Children are always an addendum in every major debate," Stephen Lewis, the U.N. secretary-general's special envoy on HIV/AIDS in Africa, said during a U.N. conference on AIDS orphans held in Johannesburg last month.
"Although we've moved on voluntary counseling and testing, prevention of mother-to-child transmission, anti-retroviral treatment and prevention campaigns ... we have not moved on orphans. It is the toughest issue in the spectrum of AIDS issues," Lewis said.
The Johannesburg meeting, organized by former South African President Nelson Mandela, urgently called on African governments to discuss the orphan problem, launch campaigns to ensure that every child is in school, and pursue health programs to keep HIV-positive parents alive with anti-AIDS drugs.
Such goals, if and when they are realized, offer little help now to the struggles of families such as the Malingas, who on a recent sweltering afternoon huddled in the shade of their traditional Zulu hut, not stirring except to swat away a fly.
Time appears to have all but stopped at the family's homestead. The hands on the battery-powered clock hanging on the wall of their hut are frozen at 6:45. The thatch roof on their hut is caving in. The yard is littered with tin cans, plastic bags and old clothes.
The Malingas don't talk with any excitement about what career they might choose, where they might travel, what the years ahead might bring.
Instead, life is measured out in meals. Today there is a bag of soybeans and some stiff corn porridge. Tomorrow they'll eat the same. Tholakele Malinga opens up a box with their meager food stores and judges that they have enough for the next week or so. Then they'll start worrying again.
Without assistance, the odds are stacked against families such as the Malingas. Health officials say orphans have a greater chance of becoming malnourished, of dropping out of school, of being forced into child labor. In families with no income, young orphan girls try prostitution to earn money and become infected with the AIDS virus.
African families share a strong tradition of assisting neighbors and relatives during times of hunger, illness and disaster, but the AIDS crisis is placing new financial strains on a system unequipped to respond to a humanitarian disaster of this size.
The people who live along these winding dirt roads in the Lubombo Mountains have always been poor, living without electricity or running water. Even before AIDS, families here were being torn apart. With few job opportunities in this part of the country, the men migrated to the gold mines and cities to look for work but were forbidden under apartheid to take their families with them. Sleeping with mistresses and prostitutes in cities, the migrant laborers helped spread the virus to their wives in the countryside.
The Malingas' father worked at a butchery in Empangeni, a cattle-, cotton- and timber-producing center about a three-hour drive away. No one in the family knows when or how he was infected, but they remember that shortly after their mother died, they heard their father was ill.
After his death, the Malinga children's pleas for help went unanswered by neighbors, even by close relatives living nearby.
"They are worthless," Tholakele Malinga said bitterly. "Even if we have nothing to eat or we need money to go to the hospitals. We are left on our own."
Recently, the Malingas started receiving assistance from Ingwavuma Orphan Care, a charity supporting about 2,000 orphans in this remote corner of South Africa near the borders with Swaziland and Mozambique.
Five years ago, Ann Barnard, a British physician who heads the charity, arrived at Mosvold Hospital in the small village of Ingwavuma, KwaZulu Natal province, expecting to spend most of her time treating malaria and mending broken limbs. Instead, she was overwhelmed first by the number of AIDS patients and second by the number of malnourished children whom she would treat again and again.
The children she was seeing were orphans whose mothers and fathers had died of AIDS. Two years ago, she decided to do something about it, offering orphans food, clothing, school fees and, most significantly, helping them apply for government welfare grants of $45 per month.
When word of her work spread, the pleas for help flooded in. Today, Barnard manages her charity with a computer database containing profiles of more than 2,000 children who have lost one or both parents. Each click of her computer mouse opens up a new story of hardship and sorrow: a family of eight children headed by a 21-year-old daughter; 15-year-old twin brothers who are being raised by an alcoholic grandmother; the seven Malinga children, who receive one box of food per month from Orphan Care.
On a recent afternoon, a boy in a torn suit coat and oversized shoes knocked on Barnard's door. His name was Bongelani Nyawo, 17, who lost his mother to AIDS in 1995 and his father to the same disease in 1996. He was raising his two young brothers, ages 12 and 14, and his 18-year-old sister.
Nyawo explained that the school principal was demanding school fees for his brothers and sister. If they did not pay, the principal threatened, he would not allow them to take their year-end exams, preventing advancement to the next grade.
The principal's demands were illegal. Under South African law, all children are allowed to attend, regardless of ability to pay school fees. Barnard quickly dashed off a letter to the principal explaining so.
But Nyawo's case, said Barnard, is not unusual. Orphans are frequently victims of abuse by school officials, neighbors and relatives, who take advantage of them. In several cases, Barnard has won welfare grants for the children, only to find that relatives charged with collecting it for the children pocket most of the money.
Her charity's work has limits, Barnard says. It can offer financial support, food and guidance, but it cannot replace parents.
"Children are growing up without guidance and may become delinquents who won't have parenting skills to raise their own children," she says.
Tholakele Malinga is afraid of what will become of her family. At just 20 years old, she has responsibilities of a person twice her age. She worries about her 18-year-old sister, Ntombfuthi, who leaves home for weeks at a time seeking shelter with relatives. Her brother Bhekitemba is frequently ill. Although he is 16, he is about the size of a 10-year-old and often misses school because of headaches.
Sometimes the Malingas remember happier times, when their father, healthy and strong, would walk down the narrow footpath to their home, his arms weighted down with bags of new clothes and sweets for his children. Their mother would cook a feast for all of them.
But they try not to talk about their parents too much, Tholakele Malinga says. It can be confusing for the youngest brother, 7-year-old S'busiso, who still doesn't understand what happened to them.
"He says, 'I want my mother,' believing she'll be back one day," Tholakele says.