What is the Problem?

While only ten percent of the world's people live in Africa, it is home to 90 percent of the world's HIV-infected children. In sub-Saharan Africa 470,000 children die every year from AIDS. For more than 90 percent of these children, the deadly virus is transmitted from their mother.

Of 30 children born to HIV-positive mothers, approximately 10 will acquire the virus at birth. Four more will become infected through their mothers breast milk. Most of these children will not live to see their 5th birthdays.

Many young girls are infected by a man convinced that having sex with a virgin can cure him. This cruel myth is being perpetuated across Africa. To "cure" their disease, infected men are targeting younger and younger girls as sexual partners, willing or not.

Where are the Parents?

For the most part, the parents are dead- or dying. In the Western world, aggressive drug therapies, better nutrition and health in general can prolong the life of an AIDS victim for decades. In Africa however, an HIV-infected person can only expect to live six to 10 years before dying of AIDS.

More than 5.5 million children in eastern and southern Africa, at the epicenter of the epidemic, have lost their mothers or both parents to AIDS.

AIDS has orphaned 9 percent of Zambia's children. In Zimbabwe 7 percent are orphans; in Malawi 6 percent. Eleven percent of Uganda's children are AIDS orphans, the highest percentage in the world.

The numbers continue to grow. In the hardest hit countries the number of AIDS orphans quadrupled between 1994 and 1997.

AIDS orphans suffer on many levels. They may need to drop out of school to care for a dying parent or to care and provide for younger siblings. They are likely to have been exposed to tuberculosis and other opportunistic infections plaguing an HIV-positive adult.

They may be sent to live with relatives, all too often a grandparent already catering for grandchildren from three or four families.

What makes it worse?

Orphans are less likely than are other children to be able to go to school or to have access to adequate health care. They are more likely to live in poverty and to be malnourished.

They are more likely to engage in hazardous labor, including commercial sex work that in turn exposes them to greater risk of HIV infection.

Orphans in some cases have no choice but to form child-headed households in which older children raise their younger brothers and sisters. Child-headed households are among the most economically vulnerable in Africa.

Already, young people form the majority of the population in sub-Saharan Africa. As adults continue to die of AIDS, the children are left behind in a vacuum deprived of parental guidance -- a sea of youth, disadvantaged, vulnerable, undereducated, without hope and opportunity.

What is the Solution?

Jesus.  Jesus IS *THE* answer. Simple, but not simplistic.  Not some "pat answer" religion, nor some anemic "social gospel". Simply the living, walking, breathing Christ, as expressed through His bride, the Church.

Africa and her people are in crisis, and there is only one recourse; repentance. As with all individuals, congregations, or nations, God can bring healing only when they cry out in repentance, and as God to forgive their sins, and heal their land (2 Chron 4:7)

Leviticus 26:40-42 "If they shall confess their iniquity, and the iniquity of their fathers, with their trespass which they trespassed against me, and that also they have walked contrary unto me; ... and they then accept of the punishment of their iniquity: Then will I remember my covenant... and I will remember the land."