Since its independence from Portugal in 1975, Mozambique, a country located on the southeast coast of Africa, has endured civil war, famine and the HIV/AIDS pandemic’s social consequences. The country has the world’s second-highest number of HIV/AIDS infections (CIA – The World Factbook), leaving an estimated 2 million children who have lost one or both parents (UNICEF).
When Cross Catholic Outreach President Jim Cavnar first visited Mozambique in 2003, he was shocked by the devastation that the pandemic had caused.
“At the time, there were no antiretroviral medications available to treat people with AIDS in Mozambique,” he recalled. “It was a huge epidemic at the time; there were hundreds of thousands of orphans left from people dying of AIDS.”
In those days, AIDS was a death sentence for poor Mozambicans. Once diagnosed, the poor and middle class would die just a few weeks later. Mozambique’s upper class were able to fly to South Africa and get antiretroviral treatments.
“Everywhere we went, we heard about the plight of orphans,” Jim continued. “I remember visiting villages, and you would look around and see older people and kids, but almost no one in between. The parents of almost all the children had died of AIDS. And now the grandparents were taking care of them.”
Since that first visit, much has changed in Mozambique. The government now provides antiretroviral medications to those battling AIDS. But the effects of losing an entire generation are still impacting society, especially the nation’s children and elderly population.
In traditional African society, orphans are typically taken in by neighbors or extended family members, usually grandparents. Unfortunately, the sheer number of lives lost to war and disease has stretched these extended family members’ resources to the limit.
Some people have taken in as many as 10 orphaned children and are struggling to feed children of their own. As a result, many orphans have been left to fend for themselves, often begging on the streets or working odd jobs to survive.