09/15/99- Updated 12:30 PM ET
 Zimbabwe: Kids forced into manhood

By Steve Sternberg, USA TODAY

    MUTARE, Zimbabwe - At 15, Willard Tinet is the man of his house, single-handedly caring for brothers Joseph, 14, and Cloud, 12. The boys' mother died of AIDS, but Willard doesn't know when. "She died a long time ago," he says sadly.
    The boys' father disappeared after his wife became ill. An older sister married and moved in with her husband's family, abandoning her brothers. A community volunteer, Maris Kazewbe, believes that the boys have been living alone since 1994.
    But the Tinet children are luckier than some orphaned by AIDS; they have a place to lay their heads. Thousands of others live on the streets.
    For Willard, today is special because he is receiving an eminent guest in his home: Sandra Thurman, the White House's top AIDS official. It is Thurman's third stop on her mission to four sub-Saharan countries devastated by AIDS.
Clad in rags, Willard sits cross-legged on the floor of the family's tiny, boxlike concrete home. It is on the outskirts of Mutare, in the mountainous western highlands that border Mozambique.
    The walls of the one-room cell are pale green, now chipped and stained. There are a few sticks of furniture and a filthy, mirrored armoire, a relic of happier times.
    Willard seems quiet, almost unaccustomed to speech. But at times the personality of an ordinary 15-year-old penetrates the awkwardness and silence.
    "How do you eat?" asks Thurman, sitting next to Willard on the concrete floor.
    "I prepare the meals," Willard answers through United Methodist Bishop Christopher Jokomo, whose grandfatherly appearance seems to reassure the boy.
    Willard says he and his brothers grow some vegetables in the community garden. If all fails, they go to bed hungry. They also get weekly visits from Maris Kazewbe and Elizabeth Chihota, volunteers from the Family AIDS Caring Trust (FACT) site at the St. Augustine mission in Mutare.
    "Sometimes I am here late in the day and there's nothing, no food," says Kazewbe, who then goes out and gets the boys something to eat.
    St. Augustine, one of the parishes over which Jokomo presides, is one of five FACT sites. All told, 137 FACT volunteers care for 4,000 orphans, from infants through 15-year-olds.
    In this country of 12 million people, where one of every three sexually active adults is believed to be infected by HIV, the problem is certain to grow.  UNAIDS, the United Nations' AIDS organization, estimates that one-third of the children here will lose one or both parents during the next decade.
    "Everybody in Zimbabwe has lost someone, either from their immediate or their extended family," says Shadreck Kagora, a pastor and coordinator of Families, Orphans and Children Under Stress, an offshoot of FACT.
    Today, Kagora says, most of the nation's nearly 600,000 orphans live with grandparents or other relatives. But family circumstances and cultural barriers strand many orphans in a nether world of hunger, loneliness and neglect.
    For instance, Willard and his brothers are prisoners of their mothers' belongings, gathered in a small wicker basket suspended from the ceiling.  When the boys' mother became ill, relatives from Mozambique came to get her, Chihota explains. "They took her to Mozambique to get well," she says. "They didn't believe she had AIDS."  When the boys' mother died, her family failed to come back, collect her belongings and divvy them up among relatives, as Shona tribal custom dictates they should. Until they do, the boys will remain pariahs, shunned by those who would otherwise care for them.  Relatives on their father's side of the family, for example, won't enter the house until that ritual is completed, to avoid offending the Ngozi, or avenging spirits.
    "Instead, the children suffer," Jokomo says.
    As Chihota tells the story, Cloud bursts into the house. He stops short at the door, startled to see visitors. He barely speaks; he never smiles.  When his apprehension wanes, Cloud's face becomes a mask of emotional desolation.  Willard, when asked what he would like to be when he grows up, answers promptly, "A pilot."
    Cloud sits on a chair, alone in a room full of people, saying nothing. He seems unable even to contemplate his future. Gently prodded by Jokomo, he mutters: "I don't know."
    "That little brother there," says Chihota, out of earshot, "what a lot of sadness in his face. Lord, have mercy."