As AIDS devastates country, children must live alone

A sack of cornmeal, some beans and some cooking oil make up a month's rations.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
HA RAPHIRI, Lesotho -- Each morning, Khoali and Khoolinyane Molalili rise at 5 a.m., splash frigid water from an old plastic basin on their faces, cook a small tin pot of corn porridge for breakfast and walk to school, an hour's journey through the frost-covered hills.
In the afternoon, after the long walk back home, Khoolinyane sweeps the dirt floor of their barren concrete house with a homemade grass broom and cooks another pot of porridge, while Khoali makes another long walk for water and then washes their threadbare school uniforms.
At night, the two boys climb onto a cowhide on the hard dirt floor, pull up a shared blanket and try to rest.
"It's a difficult life," Khoolinyane admits quietly, staring down at his bare feet. "We always have no clothes, no shoes, none of those luxuries."
Childhood ended for the Molalili twins in 2001, when their mother died of AIDS. Overnight the 11-year-olds, who lost their father to AIDS in 1997, joined Lesotho's legions of orphans.
Today AIDS has become so widespread in the mountainous southern African country that one in 10 children younger than 15 is an orphan. The United Nations counts as orphaned any child who has lost one parent, but in this nation where one out of three people carries the AIDS virus, once one parent dies of the disease the other is rarely far behind.
Some are taken in
The luckiest of the orphans are taken in and raised by relatives. But with so many parents dying, grandparents and extended families are overwhelmed. Some reject the children out of fear of the stigma associated with AIDS. So across Lesotho's hills, more and more orphans are raising themselves.
The Molalili twins, now 14, are relatively lucky. The tin roof of the small home they once shared with their parents bangs in the constant wind, but it stays on. Since Lesotho declared AIDS a national emergency in 2001, the government has given them a sack of cornmeal, some beans and a couple of liters of cooking oil each month and paid their school fees. Best of all, the boys have an older sister, now 25, who moved back in with them the year after their mother died.
"She's just like a mother," Khoolinyane says, smiling a little as he describes how she sometimes helps them with their homework at night. But most days they do not see much of her. At 5 a.m., she leaves for the hours-long commute to her low-paying job in a garment factory. By 7 p.m., when she arrives home again, the boys have dinner ready and are preparing for bed.
"When she gets here, everything is done," Khoolinyane says.
On weekends, the twins spend their days herding the neighborhood sheep through the hills, helping the neighbors who in turn watched their three sheep while they were in school. For fun, they play checkers, scratching a board into the dirt and using pebbles found in the fields.
Money is always short. While their sister's paycheck is enough to buy schoolbooks, the boys get a new set of clothes and shoes only once a year, at Christmas. When their classmates go on a field trip to neighboring South Africa later this month, they will stay at home. Their clothes are too worn for them to make the trip even if they had money for the bus.
Asked what they hope to be when they grow up, they say policemen. Police, they note, wear bright new uniforms and new shoes.
The twins have only one small photograph of their mother, propped on a dusty chest. They remember her taking them to the fields with her and playing as she worked.
"She was a very sweet mother," Khoali says, staring out the window through frayed, once-white curtains.