Child-headed households find it impossible to access help from community members or government, the South African Aids Conference in Durban heard on Tuesday.
A research study by Dr Ann Barnard of Ingawavuma Orphan Care in the Ingwavuma district of northern KwaZulu-Natal showed that children as young as four are battling to care for their dying parents and siblings.
Of the 137 children surveyed in 35 families, 100 were caring for their parents, most of the child care givers (60%) are girls. More than half the children were not attending school while they cared for their parents and 54%, most of whom were under 12, were seeking work to try and help the family survive.
The families surveyed experienced pathetically little help from government or the communities they lived in, said the report. Only two were receiving support from the Department of Welfare, no other families received government assistance.
Barnard noted that this was against a background of 36% of people living in KwaZulu-Natal being HIV-infected, with 47% of infections in people under the age of 20.
Poverty and HIV are constant companions — 36% of those in KwaZulu-Natal have no regular income.
Barnard’s study reveals precisely how HIV/Aids devastates families.
The families contained 78 adults and 137 children with no one experiencing regular paid employment. Of those families 16 had no healthy adults, and five had no healthy adults older than 25. Six families had two sick members and two were caring for three ill family members.
Two-thirds of the households had experienced one or more deaths in the last three years due to HIV/Aids, with most of the deaths in children younger than five the report said.
A third of the parents died during the three-month study period.
Children as young as four caring for their Aids-ill parents, most parents were experiencing pain, weakness, chronic diarrhoea, coughs, night sweats, shortness of breath and confusion.
Although government’s orphan strategy is to keep Aids orphans in the communities in which their parents live, Barnard’s survey showed that prayer was the most common form of assistance given to children battling to survive with their Aids-infected parents.
Only a quarter of community members considered that the children needed support and only 15% of families received help with nursing the sick parent.
”Most support from the community was fairly superficial and the burden of care fell on the children. Only half of families felt the extended family was willing to help.”
But of even greater concern was that families were unable to access help from non-governmental organisations and government,” Barnard said.
Children do not worry about their future, only six of the 137 worried about their education, their main anxiety was about whether their parents would die and how best to keep them alive, Barnard found. Food was a major concern in every household.
She said a multi-sectoral approach was needed to help families, including, the extension of home-based care needed, teachers needed to be made aware of the social problems facing their pupils and churches should provide greater practical support for need families. – Sapa