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Young Heroes

Swaziland’s National Emergency Response Council on HIV/AIDS (NERCHA) has recently launched Young Heroes, a nonprofit program through which Americans and others overseas can sponsor orphan families with monthly donations for food and clothing (education is hoped to be added in 2007). Swaziland, a country located between South Africa and Mozambique, has the highest rate of HIV in the world, with 42.6 percent of adults ages fifteen to forty-nine reportedly infected. Children who have lost at least one parent number about 70,000, according to UNICEF estimates; nearly 15,000 who have lost both parents are trying to raise their siblings themselves. At NERCHA’s request, two Peace Corps volunteers from the United States, Justin Garland and Steve Kallaugher, worked with the organization to create the program. Kallaugher has stayed on at NERCHA as the Young Heroes’ project supervisor.

“Far more orphans have some kind of caretaker—usually a grandparent—than are on their own. But there remains a sizeable population of child-headed households, and it’s growing daily,” says Kallaugher, who adds that extended families and neighborhood support systems are strained. Some relief comes from UNICEF and World Food Programme, and some communities have Neighborhood Care Points (NCPs), “where orphans can get one meal a day and sometimes informal basic education.”

The children face extreme challenges, including poverty; lack of food and/or agricultural know-how, compounded by a five-year drought; lack of free education or the literacy needed to apply for government-funded tuition imbursement; lack of emotional sustenance; maintaining control of the homesteads they have inherited; and exploitation. “Orphans are the most vulnerable population, and there are plenty of people—usually men—around to exploit them....At one NCP where I worked, there were about seventy-five children, with an average age of approximately eight years. Nearly two-thirds of them had sexually transmitted infections. When a child like this is abused, there is usually no one to turn to for help. The more benign form of this abuse—if it can be called that—is transactional: A child with nothing is promised a meal or an article of clothing in return for sex.”

Nearly fifty of the program’s original 300 children have been sponsored. “We are doing our first distribution of monthly sponsorship money next week. But another early indicator is the look of joy on the faces of the families when we tell them we have found a sponsor, and that they will have a steady source of food for the next year. Many people here, especially in the rural communities, have grown used to disappointment, to programs that say they will help but never come to pass. These children have lost all the security they had. They’ve watched parents die and now they are alone. In the midst of their grief and incomprehension, they’re also frightened and lonely.” The program’s “dream is to find enough sponsors to feed and clothe every orphan in Swaziland.”

For as little as $20 per month per child, an organization, class, family, or individual can sponsor an orphan family. (All sponsorship money reaches the families, except for ninety-five cents to cover banking transaction fees.) Adults are welcome to sponsor, but the program encourages youth to reach out to youth.

Find out more about Young Heroes by logging on to http://youngheroes.org.sz.