Every day in Zambia, 300 men, women and children die of AIDS. Frank McDonald reports from Lusaka.
Victor Ngombi, a tiny, emaciated 10-year-old dying from AIDS at the Cicetekelo Hospice in Ndola, wouldn't have heard anything about the great world summit in Johannesburg. It won't matter a whit to him anyway - he'll be dead within three weeks.
Victor, his face blotched by Kaposi's sarcoma and his lungs wracked by tuberculosis, is the last of six members of his family to succumb to this modern-day plague. All of his brothers and sisters have died and both of his parents too.
The death rate from AIDS in Zambia is running at about 300 per day. Every 10 days, the same number of people die as were killed in New York's twin towers on September 11th last. Nearly 30 per cent of the 15 to 44 age group are infected.
Economically and socially, the effects are horrendous. In Zambia's southern province, 10,000 untrained teachers have had to be employed to replace the trained ones who have died from AIDS. It also wiped out 10 per cent of the country's last parliament.
Zambia is still paying €162 million in interest every year on its €7.5 billion national debt. This is equivalent to its entire health budget and at least half of its education budget.
"It's pure cruelty", says Sister Eileen Keane, the doctor who runs the Cicetekelo Hospice. Asked yesterday if she thought the World Summit on Sustainable Development would make any difference, she replied: "No, I don't."
Nobody else we met in Ndola does either.
Ndola is the capital of Zambia's economically-depressed copper belt. Late last year, Anglo American, the US company that runs the mines, announced that it was pulling out.
Now, the thousands of workers who depended on mining are facing a very uncertain future.
Sister Eileen, a doctor from Limerick who has been working in Zambia for 21 years, is passionate about the need to cancel its debt. "To expect this country to deal with all the problems it has is like asking someone bound hand-and-foot to get up and run."
She stood at the end of little Victor's bed yesterday afternoon and made her case forcefully to the Minister of State for Overseas Development Co-operation, Mr Tom Kitt, who was touring Irish-funded projects in Ndola.
Mr Kitt had been greeted in song, as he was everywhere on his whistle-stop tour, by local women in blue smocks who act as care-givers at the hospice for a bag of meal and the equivalent of €5 per month. Ireland Aid paid for two staff houses at the hospice.
Since it was set up in 1999, Sister Eileen's project has cared for 750 male and female AIDS victims, of whom 510 have died. Yesterday, a 17-year-old boy was laid out in the prayer room for his funeral Mass.
Many of the projects assisted by Ireland Aid in Zambia's copper belt are health-related. They include a maternity clinic in Lubuto and the Ndola College of Biomedical Sciences, which trains laboratory technicians.
But Mr Kitt was asked directly about the €32 million cut in his Department's aid budget for this year by Father Fergus Conlon, an SMA missionary. He gave the customary explanation, while emphasising his commitment to reach the UN target by 2007.
Sister Helen Scully, a Limerick-born nun, complained there were too many international conferences and workshops and not that much to show for it all.
Of Johannesburg, Sister Helen said: "I don't see how it will make a blind bit of difference".