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LAND OF A MILLION ORPHANS: DailyMail.com

investigates the hidden African crisis driven by AIDS and
meets ‘children raised by children’ left behind in Zambia
• PART 1 OF AN EXCLUSIVE 3-PART SERIES; READ PART 2 AND PART 3
• Zambia is a land-locked nation in sub-Saharan Africa whose population of 17 million includes 1 million
orphans, according to the United Nations Development Programme
• AIDS killed an entire generation of parents, leaving the country with half its population younger than 18;
DailyMail.com traveled there to meet children in two slums in the capital city
• Hundreds of thousands of children there sleep in overcrowded one-room shacks or under plastic tarps
• One in 13 Zambians will die before age 5, and many kids don’t know their parents or their own birthdays
• More than 1.2 million Zambians live with HIV; new cases are 29 times as common as in the United States and
53 times the United Kingdom’s rate
• Sexual abuse is rampant; some tribes’ cultures teach that sex with a virgin can cure AIDS, driving child rape
and more HIV infections
• You can learn more about humanitarian crises in Zambia from UNICEF, UNAIDS, the PEPFAR program or
Family Legacy

By DAVID MARTOSKO FOR DAILYMAIL.COM IN LUSAKA, ZAMBIA

PUBLISHED: 9 July 2019
With photography by DAVID MARTOSKO FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

When the bacteria that started eating a hole through Richard’s right leg at age 11 began
attacking his tibia bone, he thought he would die like the others. ‘It started on its own,’ he says.
‘It was bad. I was thin, I couldn’t walk.’

Richard was 15. For four years he had watched and waited in the Kanyama slums of Lusaka,
Zambia. In the shadow of third-world slaughterhouses, healers from his native Tumbuka tribe
worked their powders and charms. When the draining wound made it too painful to stand,
and walking to school was a pointless memory, his grandmother took him to the only pediatric
infectious disease specialist in the country – without any money in her pocket.

‘A chunk of bone came out, almost like a fist,’ the American doctor who saved Richard’s life
recalls. The stubborn germs had slowly obliterated what had held it together. Round-the-clock
IV antibiotics continued for months.

Richard, now 18, is one of the lucky ones. Even as he awaited amputation or death in Lusaka,
he had a makeshift roof over his head and the one adult from his extended family who could

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Land of a million orphans: Benjamin, a Zambian boy in the Buseko Market slum of the capital city Lusaka,
doesn’t know his father and he contracted HIV, his step-aunt believes, from his now-deceased mother’s breast
milk (DailyMail.com is not publishing the surnames of any children in this report)

be found. His grandmother idled with him for years while she watched over his brothers and
sisters.

‘My mother, I don’t know where she is now,’ Richard tells me, ‘but my father is dead.’

A more devastating infection, AIDS, took him.

Richard is among Zambia’s 1 million orphans, the United Nations Development Programme
reports. They live in a land-locked nation of 17 million people that is about the size of Texas. The
United States, with its 327 million people, has about 443,000 children in foster care, according
to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Most of Zambia’s orphans are collateral damage of a well-understood AIDS epidemic. The
outside world hasn’t, however, grappled with the staggering number of children left without
mothers and fathers. UNICEF puts that total at 52 million throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

In countries like Zambia, where help from the developed world came too late, children raise
children in trash heaps and chicken coops, or under discarded plastic tarps.

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Zambia is a nation that has lost a generation of adults to the AIDS pandemic, leaving behind what the UN
Development Programme says are 1 million orphans including many groups of children who band together in
Lusaka to ‘raise’ each other in what amounts to a feral lifestyle

One million in a nation of 17 million people. The impact is staggering.

The same ratio would give the U.S. more than 19 million orphans, matching the combined
populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix.

The developed world brought AIDS under control a quarter-century ago. In Zambia it robbed
an entire generation of its fathers, mothers, big brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and
godparents. Today more than half the country’s population is younger than 18.

Children who wander the streets here, castaways in their own country, don’t know where they
are from. Few know their own birthdays. The grinding poverty in Zambia’s capital city can be
measured in hundreds of thousands of their lives, or one at a time.

There’s Benjamin, whose thousand-mile stare looks past the father he never knew and the
mother who, his step-aunt says, gave him HIV through her breast milk.

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Barefoot and ragged children are everywhere in Lusaka’s charitably named ‘compounds,’ in reality bleak
shantytowns

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Victoria, says an older boy, is seven but she speaks no English ‘and only a little Nyanja,’ the most
common tribal language in Lusaka.

Tamara beams for photos but can’t say where she sleeps. Her name means ‘some loved ones are
no longer with us’ in the Bantu dialect spoken in Zambia’s easternmost province, where her home
village could be. She doesn’t know.

Barefoot and ragged kids are everywhere.

LIFE IN THE SLUMS

Seven in 10 Lusaka residents live in ‘compounds,’ charitably named shantytowns where most of
America’s poor would be envied as polished elites. The euphemism evokes military order and
security, but these are among the world’s most shambolic slums.

In Chainda, one of the more developed of the improvised skid rows, a 30-something woman says
she lives in a single room with her six children, plus three more girls who belonged to her sister,
who died from AIDS-related pneumonia.

Sound the alarm: In another slum, Buseko Market, parentless teens raise parentless children on the street
– where they sleep on fanned-out bundles of dried tall grass and make brooms from them to sell after they
wake up

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Richard, an 18-year-old who lost his father to AIDS and doesn’t know whether his
mother is alive, was lucky enough to live with his grandmother from early childhood
– but contracted an aggressive infection that nearly cost him his leg; he shows his
scars from where a chunk of bone came out during the first of several surgeries

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Video: Homeless live on the streets in Zambia’s Buseko Market slum

Those three children sit alone. Having a parent who perished from AIDS is considered shameful,
socially branding these unlucky children. They bury their heads when I pick up my camera.

‘I do not know them and I cannot help them,’ says the woman, whose name is Fatima. ‘They
come, they eat, they go.’

Flies swarm around the faded blue washtub where Fatima squeezes soapy water into children’s
clothing while she insists my lens cap must stay put: ‘No snaps here. No snaps.’ Two of her boys
are shirtless, along with one of her girls.

It’s winter in Zambia. Parched and 70 degrees Fahrenheit, 50 at night.

A metal pipe and faucet stick out of the ground where a borehole struck liquid gold ten yards
away. Mud-streaked ten-gallon water jugs surround it. Driving through the city and inventorying
hand-painted billboards, the most advertised business is drilling for water. Mosquito control
is a close second. Green murals promoting a brand called ‘Doom’ provide Chainda’s brightest
splashes of color.

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Zambia is a land-locked African country whose Third-World-ness hides its status as an oasis for Congolese
fleeing war and Zimbabweans escaping economic collapse; but because AIDS condemned a generation of
adults, Zambia’s median age is under 18

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Soccer is the number one sport in in Lusaka’s slums but children there seldom have balls to play
with; they wrap plastic bags around each other into a multilayered sphere and then melt the outside
together

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Off-brand Crocs and other sandals are the most common footwear, but about half of the kids were barefoot
on one late June afternoon – the middle of Zambia’s winter

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A map published in the journal Nature this year shows the extent of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa in dramatic
detail; the purple areas, with the highest rates of infection, include Botswana, Zimbabwe, portions of South
Africa and about half of Zambia

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On a trip through Lusaka it’s impossible to avoid garbage piles like this one; middle-class Zambians in gated
communities complain about the smell but children grow immune to it and play there

Down the dirt street comes a boy in a faded Seattle Seahawks t-shirt, a castoff from some less-
than-Super Bowl year. He’s shuffling in a pair of off-brand Crocs behind a makeshift soccer ball
fashioned from plastic grocery bags, wrapped into a sphere and melted together with a gas
torch. It unravels bit by bit.

Esther, a three-year-old, clings to my leg. A skinny boy wraps bony arms around me.

‘I am King. But it’s only my name,’ he says. ‘Not a real king.’

King is 10 years old but looks to be six. Many 14-year-olds in Chainda can pass for 10. The six-
year-olds appear four at most. Malnutrition has shortened and stunted them.

Mary, a hair-matted girl in a filthy beach t-shirt, can’t stop her quivering dance against the
backdrop of charcoal sellers, one of the few obvious businesses in this grid of hovels. In another
makeshift storefront, a man sells liquor in 100 milliliter bottles.

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Video: Rescued Zambian orphan girls sing gospel music in Lusaka

Holly Scurry, the chief relationship officer at a Christian charity called Family Legacy, says one
dirt-caked child there told her he wanted God to show him ‘what it felt like to be clean.’

Family Legacy operates 26 schools in and around Lusaka, educating 15,000 children. The group
also cares for nearly 800 orphans full-time, taking the hardest cases out of the slums and giving
them their own bed, three meals a day and a safe place to grow up.

But the compounds loom just minutes away. Piles of charcoal dot the street corners there,
supplied by gangs of young boys who venture into the nearby countryside to burn down
forests, one stand of trees at a time. Smoke plumes are visible from hilltops all day, every day.
Glowing charcoal is the key ingredient in virtually all cooking.

A government pension fund owns the land, so no one watches it. It was fenced off until
someone stole the fence.

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Holly Scurry is the public face of Family Legacy, a Texas-based charity that has
built 64 homes to care for nearly 800 Zambian orphans, and 26 schools to edu-
cate 15,000 children in the compounds

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Market stalls in Buseko used to provide sleeping cover for most of the population, but after many burned
down the lumber-sellers took over and evicted nearly everyone; water for locals comes from a communal
well, distributed in grubby plastic jugs

MORE THAN ONE AT A TIME

Buseko Market, one of the city’s most everything-strapped ghettos, is worse. Market stalls
double as housing for some. The accident-prone set fires. Riots break out over territorial
squabbles and who should tend to the ever-present trash heaps. Lumber and roofing sellers
have displaced hundreds, who sleep along the roads.

Blackened, grimy sewage ditches separate humans from trucks, with makeshift gangplanks the
only way across. Sanitation is practically nonexistent and a 30-something woman named Mary
says the one public toilet within a half-hour’s walk ‘is too dangerous.’ The unsavory lurk there. It’s
well-lit but costs money.

Stenches come and go with anemic breezes, seesawing from diesel exhaust to human waste
and back again. The taste settles on the tongue. Vermin have free rein. The locals trap some rats
for food.

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Video: Prince Harry gave inspirational speech to young Zambians in 2018

As the sun sets, children by the dozen return from the innards of the slum dragging clouds
of dust. No grown-ups call their names. They will sleep beneath fanned-out bales of dried tall
grass, near adults who make brooms of the material to sell in the daylight.

A young woman with her hair in braids, perhaps 20, idles outside a pint-size shack covered in
corrugated steel. Asked who lives there, a man named Chanda points and offers a broad grin.

‘Mahule,’ he says. Prostitutes. It’s a word that means more than one at a time. A teenage girl
emerges for a moment to join the young woman. Chanda asks me for money.

A residence in a Lusaka compound, for anyone with a residence, can be a single stuccoed room
covered in tin or draped with a plastic tarp, and a few bricks outside to frame a spot for burning
charcoal so a woman can cook. Like two-thirds of Zambians, she and her extended bunch have
no electricity.

They sleep six or eight or twelve abreast, concentration-camp style. Girls are routinely evicted
while they are on their periods, sent to sleep outside as ‘unclean’ – even the girls who aren’t the
heirs of the dead.

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Tamara’s name means ‘some loved ones are no longer with us,’ an example of the tribal custom of
naming children to describe the circumstances of their births

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‘I am King,’ one boy in Chainda says, ‘but it’s only my name. Not a real king.’ He goes to a school built and run by
a Texas-based Christian charity

Women in Zambia’s fast-growing cities average four children apiece. In rural villages, where a
large family is a form of old-age social security, seven or eight is common.

Polygamy is officially illegal but widely practiced under tribal laws. My airport taxi driver speaks
reverently about a fellow cabbie who was a village chief before he came to Lusaka, and now has
three wives and ‘more than 15 children.’

‘He built a house for two of them,’ he says, ‘but the thin one lives with him. He buys them all
chickens. They are very happy.’

In the compounds, though, it’s typical for a woman to be the only adult in a household, and
ordinary for her to sell her body to feed the children, who see everything. They become
sexualized at a young age. They act out what they see. The girls have babies, often lured by
older men who carry HIV.

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Zambia’s population pyramid (left) is heavily weighted toward young people (at the bottom), while the AIDS
epidemic has left fewer adults alive at the top; by comparison, the U.S. pyramid (right) shows a more evenly
distributed population with bulges corresponding to baby boomers and millennials

Smoke plumes are visible all day, every day in government-owned land near Lusaka as roving gangs of boys
burn down tree after tree for charcoal to sell; this area was fenced off until someone stole the fences

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Other than hand-painted signs for water-drillers, the most visible indications of commerce in Lusaka’s Chainda
slum are bright green murals advertising insecticides

A myth among Zambia’s biggest tribal ethnic groups is that sex with a virgin can cure a man
with AIDS. Many rape the young, girls and boys alike, and infect those who weren’t HIV-
positive from birth.

The cycle begins again, slowed only by the ultimate cruelty: One in 13 children in Zambia will
die before age five.

There is a way forward. A few charities are building up the least, the last and the lost to write
Zambia’s next chapter and take the place of the adults whose stories ended too soon.

Back in his tiny hovel, Richard still lived in constant agony. But an American doctor he had
never met was about to change his life.

‘LAND OF A MILLION ORPHANS’ IS A 3-PART SERIES; READ PART 2 AND PART 3

You can learn more about humanitarian crises in Zambia from UNICEF, UNAIDS, the
PEPFAR program or Family Legacy.

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George W. Bush pushed the PEPFAR program through Congress in 2003; its $80 billion of expenditures so far
are the largest commitment any nation has ever made toward eradicating a single disease; on July 4, 2012 the
former U.S. president and his wife Laura visited Lusaka’s Kasisi Children’s Home, which cares for 230 orphans –
a drop in the bucket (Shealah Craighead for The Bush Presidential Center)

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