June 3, 2005

AIDS, Pregnancy and Poverty Trap Ever More African Girls

By SHARON LaFRANIERE

They met a year ago on the dirt road outside her aunt's house, in this struggling township where houses are built from bound-together reeds and the only water comes from wells. Flora Muchave was 14. Elario Novunga was 22, nicely dressed and, Flora said, full of promises.
One stood out: Flora's family had been teetering on the edge of destitution since her father, a miner, died of AIDS in 2000. Elario said he would change that. ''He asked me to have sex with him, and he guaranteed everything I would need,'' Flora recalled. ''He said he would take care of everything for me.''
He lied. Elario gave Flora the equivalent of about $4 and a baby, whose impending birth has forced her to drop out of sixth grade. Before Flora's mother died in May, apparently of AIDS, she forgave her daughter for ignoring her warnings about fast-talking men. But she sketched out a bleak future for her only daughter.
''Now,'' Flora recalled her sobbing from her deathbed, ''you are going to suffer.''
Flora Muchave's cautionary tale is nothing new; Africa claims the world's highest adolescent birthrate and the world's lowest share of girls enrolled in primary school.
But for the last 25 years, the trends had been positive. African girls, like girls elsewhere, were marrying later, and a growing percentage were in school.
The AIDS epidemic now threatens to take away those hard-won gains. Orphaned and impoverished by the deaths of parents, girls here are being propelled into sex at shockingly early ages to support themselves, their siblings and, all too often, their own children.
''AIDS is reversing the trends that were improving for girls,'' said Margie de Monchy, regional child protection officer for the United Nations Children's Fund. ''We really have to look at the kinds of lousy choices -- and sometimes no choices -- that they have for survival.''
With 12 million children orphaned in sub-Saharan Africa because of AIDS, suffering abounds among boys as well as girls.
But orphaned girls tend to fare worse, relief officials say, because they traditionally hold a lower status in African society, are more vulnerable to sexual exploitation and, for anatomical reasons, are more likely than boys to contract H.I.V.
In Zimbabwe, a new Unicef study has found that orphaned girls are three times more likely to become infected than are girls whose parents are alive. In Zambia, orphaned girls are the first to be withdrawn from school.
In Zambia's capital, Lusaka, impoverished relatives order some orphaned girls as young as 14 out on the street at night, telling them they must earn their keep, a recent survey found. In Lesotho, a growing number of adolescent girls are forced to work as maids or prostitutes, Unicef researchers have reported.
''Orphaned girls are at the absolute margins,'' said James Elder, Unicef's spokesman in Zimbabwe. ''They are the very bottom of the barrel. They are much more likely to engage in risky behavior just to survive.''
Patrice Lumumba, on the Indian Ocean a three-hour drive north of the capital, Maputo, is by no means Mozambique's poorest township. Most of its houses of reeds or concrete are well built and neatly maintained. Most residents have some semblance of furniture, even if only a set of plastic chairs hauled out for guests.
But AIDS has hit hard here, like everywhere in southern Africa. One in every six people between the ages of 15 and 49 is infected with the virus in the surrounding Gaza Province. Of the town's 43,000 residents, 1,583 are orphans. One in four primary school students has lost at least one parent, according to Pedro Mausse, headmaster of the primary school.
Flora's parents furnished their two-room reed house, which has a corrugated metal roof, with a wardrobe, dishes and two upholstered chairs.
Flora said she remembers how her father's earnings from work in South Africa's mines kept the family supplied. After he died in 2000 at 36, she said, her mother's earnings as a cook for a Bible school -- the equivalent of less than $35 a month -- did not go far enough.
She could no longer afford to hire a tractor or a pair of oxen to plow the family's two fields. ''It was hard to get food and clothes and soap,'' said Flora, a short, plump girl with a ready smile, curly lashes and ebony skin.
The whole situation made her more susceptible to Elario's blandishments, she said. ''Actually, I was cheated,'' she said, smiling in embarrassment, as she waited for donated food outside a Unicef-financed organization. ''He is a big liar.''
Flora's mother, Ester, was still working as a cook in a Bible school last October when a relative told her Flora was pregnant. ''At first I denied it,'' Flora said. ''Then I started to cry. Then she started to cry. She said: 'I warned you against this. Now you are going to find out for yourself.'''
Her mother's death on May 9 is vivid in Flora's mind. That morning, she said, Ester called Flora and her 7-year-old brother to her bedside and ordered them to eat breakfast.
''I am told you are not eating, that you are spending all your time crying,'' Flora recalled her saying. ''Whether you cry or not, I am still going to die. And I don't know who will provide for you.''
Although Flora's body is unwieldy after eight months of pregnancy, she still looks like a typical adolescent. Her face is covered with acne, her black polyester blouse is frilly, her plastic thongs a cheerful yellow. But there is nothing childlike about her life anymore.
Her father's relatives have abandoned her and her brother because her mother kept her husband's possessions after he died, flouting the tradition that says that a man's relatives, and not his wife, should inherit his wealth. Her mother's sister, a widow with five children, can offer little help.
So it was Flora who, one Wednesday in May, hauled home a 66-pound sack of unmilled corn, 7 pounds of beans and a quart of cooking oil from a Unicef-supported center run by Reencontro, a Mozambican charity that assists people with AIDS and orphans. The next day, she balanced a 55-pound pail of water on her head and trekked half a mile home from the township's well.
''There isn't anyone to help,'' she said, soaked to the skin from the pail's sloshing water, as she struggled to set the bucket down. ''The responsibility is in my hands, so I have to do it.''
Workers for Reencontro are urging Flora to return to school, and Flora, who says she used to get good grades, is interested. ''But I don't know who would pay for the textbooks,'' she said.
Flora is but one of 639 orphaned girls here identified by Reencontro.
Two years ago, a worker found Lisario Mariquele, already pregnant at 13, caring for her ailing mother and three younger siblings. Her father had died at least four years earlier, apparently of AIDS.
Although a younger brother had made it to third grade, Lisario had never been to school before. What she knew was chores: hauling water, cooking over an open fire, kneeling over a wooden bowl with a heavy stick and pounding kernels of corn into paste. Her work multiplied last year after her son was born and her mother died of AIDS.
One recent morning, Lisario stopped pounding corn long enough to chat, her arms and blouse spattered with white flecks of paste. Her son, Vincente, slept nearby on a dirty reed mat, anemic and plagued with diarrhea. The dirt yard around them was strewn with beer bottles, shoes, rags and other debris.
Her son's father is named João, she said. She never learned his last name or his age. She agreed to have sex, she said, because ''he promised to take care of me.''
''It was a mistake on my part,'' she said. When the baby was born, she tracked down João in a nearby township. She said he told her: ''The baby is yours.''
Under pressure from Reencontro, she has now enrolled in first grade. Every other weekday afternoon, she lashes Vincente to her back with a strip of cloth and hikes to the school, where a two-hour class for adults is held under a tree.
She is ill-equipped and unsure of herself there. One recent Wednesday, she had to borrow a pencil and a sharpener. She repeatedly checked her notes on elementary Portuguese, Mozambique's official language, against those of a classmate.
''I learned a lot of things,'' she said the next morning, hurriedly wrapping a cloth around her naked baby. ''But I can't remember them now.''

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company