In southern Africa, many children know their mother and father only through the diaries written by the parents before they died of Aids. Rosita Boland travelled to Malawi with photographer Brenda Fitzsimons to meet some current writers of 'Memory Books', and the children who inherit them
Fidesi Nkosi is not sure, but she thinks she is nine years old. Her birth, in common with most Malawian people, was not registered, and the two people who could tell her for certain what age she is - her parents - are dead. They both died from Aids, her father in 2001 and her mother in March last year. Her two older sisters, Twandie and Tiwonge, are also dead. She doesn't remember them: she was only a baby when they died. Her brother Leonard remembers them, but he doesn't know what they died of. Leonard is not sure what age he is either. "Seventeen?" he hazards. He looks much younger.
What is certain is that Leonard is now the person who is taking care of his sister. They live together in a two-roomed thatched mud hut in Elangeni, a rural district in Malawi, north of the city of Mzuzu. Leonard gets up at 6am, when the sun rises, and prepares breakfast for Fidesi, before she walks the 4 km to school. While she is at school, he works in the garden beside their hut, which was started by their father and continued by their mother. Leonard now tends it alone. He grows maize, soya, ground-nuts and sweet potatoes. Sometimes, he sells sweet potatoes in the market so they can buy milk, but everything else he grows they eat themselves. When Fidesi comes home from school at noon, she helps to grind the maize into flour with a mortar and pestle. The flour makes nshima, a staple food for Malawian people.
School copybooks cost 12 kwacha (6 cent). Fidesi's copy, with a tiny drawing of herself in a long dress on the cover, is so tattered it will very shortly start coming apart when opened. Tattered or not, every square inch of this copy will be filled up: paper is costly and thus precious. There are very few possessions in Leonard and Fidesi's hut, but as it happens, one of them is an A4 hardback notebook with 192 pages, 188 of them blank. Yet despite this abundance of much needed paper, Fidesi will never be using this notebook for her schoolwork. This is her mother's Memory Book, which she started writing when she was diagnosed as being HIV-positive, and it is Leonard and Fidesi's only legacy.
In the 25 years since HIV was first identified, 25 million people worldwide have died of Aids. Sub-Saharan Africa, of which Malawi is part, is home to 70 per cent of the world's 37 million people with HIV.
Behind all the statistics is the day-to-day reality for millions of people living with the virus. In the quarter-century since the virus was first identified, drugs have been developed which help in managing it.
Anti-retroviral drugs, or ARVs, are now available for free in countries such as Malawi, where people cannot afford to pay for them. There is no cure for HIV, and once you have tested positive, you will always be positive, but ARVs mean that affected people have a much longer, betterquality life.
Since 2004, in five regions of Malawi, those people who have come to voluntary counselling and testing centres, and have tested positive, have been offered group therapy. It is part of a project run by the NGO, Plan, an international child-centred development organisation working with children and their families in 46 of the world's poorest countries, together with a local organisation, the National Association of People Living with HIV and Aids in Malawi. The therapy includes group and individual counselling, and the writing of Memory Books.
The first thing someone puts in a Memory Book is a drawing of their family tree. Then they write the story of their lives: where they were born, who their relatives were, where they went to school, what they worked at, when they married, and when their children were born. The last section of the Memory Book is about their life since they were diagnosed with HIV.
While there is a therapeutic element involved for the author in the writing of a Memory Book, one of its functions is to provide the bereaved children with the facts of their family history. If both parents die of Aids, then at least the children have a book in which the names of relatives and the places where they lived are recorded, so that responsibility can be taken for them by the communities from which their parents came. If they have no living relatives, it is the duty of the chief of either their mother or father's tribe in their home village to allocate the children to another family in the same tribe.
Linnah Nyirenda, Fidesi and Leonard's mother, died aged 37, before she could complete her Memory Book. She wrote only four pages; in straggling uneven script, half in capitals and half in lower-case, as if written by someone for whom writing is a difficult and unfamiliar task. There are a few faded photographs stapled in among the pages. One of them is of Linnah herself, hands on hips, smiling widely. Fidesi, who still sometimes asks Leonard when their mother is coming home, touches the photograph gently. The Memory Book, incomplete as it is, is all they have left of their parents. Continued overleaf
KAMTHAGWARA'S BOOK
In a field outside Kafukule, some 30 km from where Fidesi and Leonard live, a group of men and women are harvesting ground-nuts in the hard noon sun that bleaches white light everywhere. Even in the shade of the mango trees, the glare is intense, and this is winter in Malawi. All these people are participants in the weekly group-therapy classes, and many are writing Memory Books.
One of them is Kamthagwara Mutupi (38), who started writing a Memory Book after both he and his wife, Peggie Soko, were diagnosed last year as HIV-positive. They have two children, Stella (9) and Watson (6).
Kamthagwara has written more than 20 pages in his book, in careful, old-fashioned copperplate. It's all in the local dialect, and he agrees to lend it to us for a night, so that Patrick Zgambo, Plan Malawi's media communications manager, can translate it.
Kamthagwara's book has a beautiful drawing of an extensive family tree on the flyleaf. Stuck onto one of the pages of his book is a leaflet with diagrams, showing the correct way to put on a condom. His story, written over a three-month period, is mesmerising. Written with a directness and dignity, it is devoid of self-pity, telling how he was always simply trying to better himself. Direct quotations from the book are in italics below.
I was born on 14 May 1967, a Thursday, at 4am at St John's Hospital in Mzuzu. At eight, I started my schooling. It was discovered I was not very intelligent because I was carrying toy cars to school.
The family moved several times, but he kept tenaciously going to school.
When I was 15, we moved again. The school was very far from our village but it was the only school from which pupils were selected to go to secondary school. However, I was not selected. I did another year and I was not selected again, and this discouraged me. I had many thoughts about my future life and I remembered a proverb which said "a child of a crocodile doesn't grow up in one pond".
He moved again, to live with a cousin, and did another year, trying to get selected for secondary school, so he could get a better job.
I had all the hope. But when the results were out, it was discovered I had failed.
He went to work on a poultry farm and then, over time, did exams by distance learning.
In 1994, I passed my exams. I did the Giya [ a tribal dance of his people, to demonstrate pride and dominance].
Kamthagwara was 28 by the time he got his exams. Soon after, he got a job in the storeroom of a hotel.
The next time he went back to his village, he had decided that it was time to find a wife.
I saw Peggie Soko again, and I decided instantly this was the woman I wanted to marry. Letters went back and forth between us every day. Our families agreed to the marriage, even though I did not have the bride price.
After their first child was born, Kamthagwara was fired, and there followed a succession of jobs - buying and selling maize in rural areas, working in a shop, being a policeman. None lasted - people cheated him in trade, and he got fired from his job as a policeman for trying to arrest people at a political rally who were corrupt, but had friends in high places. He had thought this was finally his permanent job. The book ends there.
"I haven't been back in Kafukule ever since," Kamthagwara says the next day, when the book is returned to the hut where he lives, and his wide-eyed children keep close to him. He grows maize and sells a little millet for money. "I am not afraid of dying. Everyone dies. I'm very happy I'm making this Memory Book. When I get sick from HIV, I will write in it," he says quietly. "And in future, when I die, people won't be pointing fingers and saying I died of witchcraft. They will know I died of Aids."
It may sound strange to Western ears, but the fact is, when so many people are dying in southeast Africa of Aids, it has become a horribly visible fact of life. Every society has stigmas, and in Malawi, being thought to have died of witchcraft carries a far darker stigma than dying of a definable disease.
WEBSTER'S BOOK
Webster Chisi's second wife, Evelyn (37) is HIV-positive, as is Webster (45), who was diagnosed positive in 1998. His first wife, Estina, died of Aids in 1998. Four of their children have died. Four survive. Their hut is deep into the bush, an hour-and-a-half's walk from Kafukule. It's surrounded by a small tobacco plantation, which Webster is now too weak to tend: his brother helps him out.
He is on ARVs and must travel once a month to Mzuzu for the medication. Webster can't do physical work but he can make bamboo mats, which he sells for 200 kwacha (€1.13) to fund the 800 kwacha busfare he needs to get him to Mzuzu. It takes two days to make a mat.
Webster sits in the shade and shows us his Memory Book. Under the heading "How I Live With HIV", he has written these words:
When I was diagnosed with HIV in 1998, I did not have pity for myself.
In 2001, he became sick.
When I went to the hospital, I was told I had worms, but I didn't tell them I was HIV-positive, so they gave me treatment for worms. However, I didn't get fine.
Webster ended up in hospital, and improved.
I went for testing again and I was told I was still positive. I thought maybe after time the virus wouldn't be there anymore.
Webster looks us right in the eye, smiles, slaps a fly, and says he is not afraid of dying. He plans to write about his progressing illness in his Memory Book. "I want my children to know my history, and to know why I have died."
"When I die," Webster says calmly, closing his Memory book, "nobody will be whispering about witchcraft taking me. My children and everyone else will know I had HIV."
'WE HAVE SPARS OR CENTRAS. MALAWI HAS COFFIN SHOPS'
Driving through Malawi, one of the first things you notice is the number of coffin shops. In Ireland, we have Spars or Centras every few miles: in Malawi, every village has several coffin shops. The names make you gasp and do a double-take. We pass shops called Heaven Bound Funeral Parlour, Energy Coffins and Visionary Coffins. Many have their wares displayed out front, with coffins of every size, including small ones for children - 91,000 of whom died in Malawi of Aids in 2005.
It's 25 years this summer since HIV was first identified by scientists. Since then, 25 million people worldwide have died of Aids.
According to the UNAids/WHO 2006 report, there are currently 24.5 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa who are HIV-positive: two million of them died of Aids in 2005. Apart from the horrendous human cost to individual families, there is also the fact that a significant portion of a working week is spent attending funerals.
Society is constantly having to adjust to losing not only parents, but teachers, doctors, tobacco farmers and all the other workers who keep the social structure of the country going.
Aid policy for countries with high levels of HIV remains consistently controversial. The Catholic Church, for example, has only recently hinted it may be wavering from its denunciation of the use of condoms, even though condom use is proven to reduce the risk of HIV.
The total number of children orphaned by Aids in Sub-Saharan Africa is 12 million, 550,000 of them in Malawi. Fidesi and Leonard Nkosi (featured) are two of them. If Leonard really is 17, as he thinks, he may have only another 20 years of life. Life expectancy is 37 in Malawi and falling, as more people come forward to be tested for HIV. Rosita Boland
Rosita Boland and Brenda Fitzsimons travelled to Malawi as guests of the charity, Plan. See www.plan.ie. To sponsor a child with Plan, contact 1800-829829. See also Plan's insert in today's Irish Times