It is the sheer volume of children one notices first in Changwe Village, a small collection of thatched roof huts scattered along an empty sun-baked highway in central Malawi.
Dressed in threadbare school uniforms or cast-off shirts and pants, they are everywhere underfoot, running around the dusty yards, playing with crude toys, laughing and teasing each other. No one seems to be looking after them, unless you count the few old women sitting huddled together under balconies taking shelter from the scorching heat.
What those children and their ancient guardians represent paints a grim picture of how and why the HIV/Aids pandemic has spread in sub-Saharan Africa, now infecting 26-million people in the region and 15% of the Malawian population.
”Twenty years ago we were a healthy people,” Evelyn Makisoni (54), a mother of five, says sadly. ”Then, because some men in our village were making money smuggling petroleum products [diesel fuel, paraffin and petrol] bought from tanker trucks travelling through here from South Africa, Botswana and Zambia, everything changed.”
From 1984 10 to 12 tankers started arriving at the village to sell their cargo every week. The drivers had money —more money than most of the people at Changwe Village had ever seen.
”Our women wanted that money. They needed it to buy basic commodities because they were very poor and they sold themselves to get it,” Makisoni remembers. ”Suddenly everything was turned upside down.”
”People went crazy,” Andsen Jojo (63) agrees. ”The drivers would offer a woman a goat and even take her into Lilongwe [the nearby city] for a week. Within a few months even the married ones started to sleep with the drivers. They would challenge their husbands, saying ‘Who are you? You don’t have any cash resources’, and they would go off because they needed to feed their children.”
For a few years after the long-haul trucks started arriving things remained as they were. Although traditional mores had been overturned, people had money and food. New businesses started up and a few people even bought cars.
Then life in Changwe started to go horribly wrong. A few of the young people got sick and didn’t get better. Then a few more. Drugs and traditional medicines did not help and there was talk of witchcraft. But it wasn’t that.
Although they did not know it yet, the drivers had brought the HI virus with them and it spread with lightning speed through a village where no one even knew it existed.
”The wives were spreading the virus to their husbands, the unmarried women were infecting the young men, the young men making money from smuggling were going into Lilongwe and having sex there,” Jojo says. ”People were behaving very freely and they had no idea that anything bad could happen to them.”
By 1996, 12 years after the trucks first started arriving, the death rate in the village peaked at four a week. In fact, so many people were dying that residents of neighboring towns nicknamed Changwe nakongwa, literally meaning ”The Feverish Village” and a common question sarcastically asked was, ”Dare you marry someone from Nakongwa Village?”
”Our neighbours from other villages would not come to help people who were sick or help at a funeral because of fear of contracting the disease,” Jojo says. ”We became completely isolated because people thought that whatever was killing people could be contracted in any way, even through the air.”
Then, in early 1997, the residents of Changwe first heard about HIV/Aids, but the message was disturbingly vague. According to Jojo, the headman was told by the Ministry of Agriculture to send out a warning that there is a disease called Aids, and for people to take heed — but villagers were not told in detail about the virus or what the means of transmission was.
”It wasn’t until 1999 that the Malawian Ministry of Agriculture stepped in because so many people were dying,” Jojo says. ”They took me to Lilongwe for basic training about HIV/Aids and, after the training, I briefed the village headman and we set up a programme to conduct awareness meetings on prevention, transmission and identifying the symptoms of the disease. People learned and their behaviour started to change.”
Even though people are not dying as often in Changwe Village, the curse of the HIV/Aids pandemic remains. Makisoni points to the youngsters surrounding her.
”Nearly every house in this village is caring for orphaned children,” she says. ”Because parents look after their own family first, often the orphans do not have enough to eat and there is no money for school supplies. It is a terrible burden for us to carry.”