Stolen childhood:

as AIDS empties their villages of adults, increasing numbers of African orphans are raising younger siblings alone. A look inside Uganda 's child-headed households

In a small house at the end of an overgrown path, Agnes Namutebi's mother lies dying. Emaciated and covered in skin lesions, she is unable to lift hers

elf out of bed. Relatives visit and think maybe they can heal her if they bring her back to their village. So they fashion a wheelchair out of a stool and a bicycle and take the woman away. Agnes, then 8, and her three younger siblings never see their mother again. They learn later that she has died, taken by the same merciless illness that stole her father three years ago.

In another house in the same village, Richard Kibbi's mother struggles to speak. She holds her son's hand in hers and whispers, "Take care of your brothers and sister. Teach them right and wrong and protect them." She laments that the children's father is already dead, and now she is leaving, too. Richard was just 14. Richard and Agnes, who don't know each other, live a couple of miles apart in Rakai, a lush rural district in southern Uganda that has been devastated by AIDS. For the past 20 years, the country, one of the first in Africa to be hit by the epidemic, has struggled to gain control of its spread. In the late 1980's the Ugandan government launched a campaign advocating abstinence, monogamy and condom use and managed to significantly slow the rate of infection. According to some estimates, the prevalence rate has dropped from a national average of 14 percent in the late 1980's to 5 percent in 2001, a reduction unprecedented in Africa .

But among a population of about 26 million, that means there are still hundreds of thousands of Ugandans already infected and dying from the virus each year. And Uganda is just part of a larger crisis. A 2003 report released by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) calls the AIDS situation in sub-Saharan Africa an epic disaster. In 1990, according to the report, 1 million children under the age of 15 in sub-Saharan Africa had lost one or both parents to AIDS. In 2001 that number had risen to 11 million and by 2010 is expected to rise to 20 million.

In communities like Rakai, almost a third of the adult population has been wiped out--not just mothers and fathers, but aunts, uncles and neighbors--creating a new AIDS-related crisis: With so many adults wasting away, who will take care of the children?

Two Plots Under a Banana Tree

Three years after his mother's death, Richard thinks of his parents often, especially at night. "I dream about us digging in the garden or spending time together as a family," he says. Like the majority of orphans, Richard is not HIV-positive. (Only a third of children born to mothers with HIV/AIDS test positive for the virus, and many of the older orphans, like Richard, were born before their mothers became infected.) Now 18, he's lean and handsome with broad shoulders and a shy, closed-mouth smile. With his younger brother, Salif, 9, at his heels, he walks around the side of the house to his parents' graves, situated under the shade of a banana tree. The plots are covered with stones and bright flowers. "My father worked repairing bicycles in the trading center," says Richard, pointing to one of the plots. "I remember him as a quiet kind of man. He used to love us so much. After work he would bring us sweets, which made us so happy. My father taught me not to be lazy. And my mother taught me to greet adults with respect."

Every Sunday afternoon Richard calls a meeting with his three younger brothers, ages 15, 12 and 9, and his little sister, Miriam, 7. "We discuss how to behave," he says. "I tell them to be humble and to work hard. I teach Miriam to kneel when she greets an adult, and I show the boys how to stand straight, the way my mother taught me. Mostly, I teach them what my parents taught me before they died."

His father was the first to become ill. To this day, Richard says he is not sure what made him sick. "I was too young for anyone to discuss it with me," he says. But four years later, when his mother also fell ill, she pulled her son aside and told him she had Slim, the Ugandan slang for AIDS. And she told him she was going to die.

"I hoped for her to recover," says Richard. "But she complained of terrible stomachaches and had very bad diarrhea and vomiting." Sometimes female neighbors would come over to bathe her, but most of her care, including cleaning the basins into which she would be sick, fell on Richard. On the Saturday afternoon in May 2001 when she passed away, all her children were at her bedside. "We had been in the yard eating lunch and a neighbor called us inside," Richard remembers. "My mother was in her final moments. I held her hand; it felt limp and then I saw her eyes roll back. The neighbor told me this meant my mother would soon be dead."

When his mother stopped breathing, Richard cleaned her, straightened her limbs, and dressed her in a black-and-white gomesi, a traditional dress that her husband had given her. Then, in what had become too familiar a ritual, Richard sat by her bed and waited for the mourners to come.

A Disease Called Slim

Sixty miles east of Rakai lies Lake Victoria, the vast body of water shared by Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Several million people live within 50 miles of the lake, making it one of the most densely populated areas in Africa.

In Kasensero, a fishing port not far from Richard's village, the beach is teeming with rubber-booted men loading fish from their weathered boats into trucks that will take their haul inland. Just above the shore, serving the hundreds of men who work on the beach, is a busy trading center with run-down shops, places to eat, a community AIDS clinic and a maze of narrow alleys lined with small wooden shacks featuring signs that read "Motel" in faded hand-painted letters. Sometimes women in evening clothes park themselves on benches in the bright mid-morning sun. Like many places that serve a transient workforce, Kasensero hosts a thriving business in prostitution. The center is also home to the first confirmed cases of AIDS in the country. Some people call Kasensero Ground Zero.

"In the beginning we didn't know what the sickness was," says Christopher Muwau, 74, a launderer who has worked on the shores of Lake Victoria since 1980. "We thought the traders had become bewitched. People's hair would fall off and they would have sores on their bodies. Some would go to hospitals, and some would go to traditional witch doctors. They would be given herbs or told to make sacrifices to the spirits. But still the disease stayed. We were besieged; trouble was all around us." Muwau sweeps his arm wide to indicate the expanse of the beach. "When the men could no longer work, they would leave the trading center to go back to their villages and their families," he says. "That's how it spread."

It wasn't until the late 1980's, after young men in the Ugandan army started falling sick, that the government launched a massive public-education campaign about HIV/AIDS. But, unchecked for years, the virus had already taken hold. Patrick Kaganda, 38, a farmer who lives in Rakai with his wife and two children, has come to know the circumstances of the people in the village better than most. Kaganda volunteers with World Vision, a Christian relief and development organization that helps AIDS orphans in the area. Over a IS-minute drive along the two miles of dirt road that run between Richard's and Agnes's homes, Kaganda chronicles the toll AIDS has taken on his village. Across from Richard's house is a shell of a building. The husband died in 1996, the mother in 1998, leaving behind three daughters. Next to Richard's yard are the crumbling remains of the house that used to belong to his uncle. He and his wife died in 1989; their three adult children are now also dead. Next to that, another empty house. The man lost a wife to AIDS, married again and that wife died as well. After the third wife got sick, the man abandoned his house. The couple who lived next door are also dead. Next is a house where a grandmother lives with eight orphans--the offspring of her six grown children, all dead of AIDS. Across the road, a household of orphans next to a home where a man lives with his wife and nine children. Last year the man tested HIV-positive. And on and on: Three graves by an abandoned house, next to the crumbling foundation of another. The men and women who lived there dead, dead and dead.

The Orphan Factory

At Richard's mother's burial everyone wept. The women brought food for the children, and the men counseled Richard to be strong. Then, one by one, the mourners went home and the children were left to take care of themselves.