Boy from Children's Village Arusha, Tanzania…

A blanket from Children's Village Arusha, Tanzania

This is a story to accompany the beautiful blanket from Arusha. It is about a film research team from Canada, who went into the community around Arusha to record what the situation is for people there.  This is an article by SOS worker Hilary Atkins who accompanied the crew.

The first home we went to was on the slopes of Mount Meru, Tanzania's second highest mountain, up near the forest on the edge of a national park. But this was no tourist trap and in our four wheel drive safari vehicle we must have looked very out of place.

We stopped on the dirt road and walked through fields past Masai homesteads made from mud and thatch, where women washed clothes, children squealed and cows swished their tails, swatting flies. Our guide, a local community elder, led us to the house, picturesque in a rustic sense with its mud walls decorated with inlaid patterns made from broken crockery and the chicken coop near the front door.

But this coop had no chickens and the house held only sadness, in the form of three orphaned children who were barely surviving as they foraged for their daily food. This was home to twelve-year-old Alia and her brothers, James, eight, and Nicholas, nine.

The home was cold and dark, the only warmth from the sunlight outside. Beatrice Matotay, the family strengthening programme (FSP) coordinator in Arusha introduced us, the pale foreigners, to the children, and they told us their story.

The children's mother had been HIV positive and had died just two months before. Their father had long disappeared. Until her mother died Alia used to work in the fields with her, growing maize and other crops. All the children went to school. They also ate eggs from their chickens and drank milk from their goat. But now the fields lie empty, except for their mother's grave and the banana trees that grow wild around it. The chickens were sold for kerosene to light the lamp and the goat was taken for an unpaid debt. They still have their dog, a female who has just given birth to seven puppies, all doomed to die because the children cannot feed themselves, let alone their dog and its tiny unseeing offspring.

Betrayed by her eyes

James is already showing classic signs of malnutrition in his thinning hair and ringworm, while Nicholas's face is disfigured by an infected dog bite. Alia looks passable in her traditional lesso (wrap around long cotton skirt) and neat blouse but is betrayed by the fear and sadness in her eyes. Feeding her family is a big responsibility for a twelve-year-old girl.

We were there to research an appeal film for the Canadian market. The idea was to show the need - child headed families - and the solution - an SOS Children's Village. We needed to film at least four families in the community and Alias's was to be the first. The producer, a veteran of appeal films, having worked in the humanitarian sector for twelve years, knew the right questions to ask. What had the children eaten that day? When was the last time they went to school? Had Nicholas seen a doctor? And poignantly, did they have any photographs of their parents? Throughout our research the producer always asked this question and almost every child produced a small photo album, a treasured possession of happier days. Alia was the exception - the only photo she had was an identity photo of her mother stuck to a medical card. Carefully she took the cherished card from her hiding place and proudly showed it to us. The card showed her mother to be HIV positive.

More children without parents

Throughout the week we met more children like Alia and her brothers - children living without the protection of parents, vulnerable, alone and afraid. We met 14-year-old Neema who was already a mother even though she'd never given birth. She fed, washed, clothed, and cared for her four younger siblings, including four-year-old twin girls who hid in the maize fields when they returned from school at midday, afraid to go home until their older sister arrived to take care of them, afraid that someone might take them away.

We met brothers, eight and nine-year-old Tom and Martin, whose mother left them six months before to attend her own mother's funeral in Nairobi and who has never returned. Their father was already dead. They showed us their mother's room, untouched since she left, waiting for her to come back. Maybe one day she will return, but the likelihood is that their HIV positive mother is trying to spare her children the stigma associated with her disease. Or perhaps she too has succumbed to her illness?

And then there was Uncle Michael and his niece, Rachel, six, and nephew, Simon, ten. Childless himself, he was trying to care for his dead sister's children, loving them as if they were his own. But he too was sick, ravaged by arthritis, and their living conditions were dire. It was obvious that soon Rachel and Simon would once again be orphans, left to fend for themselves, but this time with no Uncle Michael to step in to help.

Had they slipped through the net...

These families were the tip of the iceberg, the ones who had been noticed, not yet split apart by the need to earn money to buy food. Had they slipped through the net, Alia and Neema might have become cheap house helps, or even prostitutes, desperate to feed themselves and their siblings. The younger children might have been kidnapped, taken away to be trafficked by those who take advantage of tragedy, and the boys, not yet men, but old enough to do physical work, might have spent long days making bricks by hand - a common form of cheap labour.

Team brings hope

Instead, the research team brought hope to these families. Even though some live far from the SOS Social Centre in Arusha, and thus outside the official boundary of the family strengthening programme, they will become part of the programme, and will receive help with educational and medical expenses as well as food supplements. Some, such as Tom and Martin, may even be taken in to the children's village, space permitting.

Meanwhile all the children will need our help for many more years, if they are to grow up and lead healthy, active lives. "The situation is desperate", said Beatrice Matotay, who also worries about the role of the local community in helping the orphans and vulnerable children around them. That is why SOS Children's Villages tries to work with the community using the family strengthening programme, though the problem is so large that SOS co-workers often lead the way.

According to UNICEF, "sub-Saharan Africa remains the region most heavily affected by HIV, accounting for 67 per cent of all people around the world living with HIV and for 75 per cent of AIDS deaths in 2007". In addition, "roughly 15 million children (worldwide) under the age of 18 have lost one or both parents to AIDS". Alia, Neema and all the other children we came across are part of those statistics. But they are also children, for whom web sites and statistics do not exist. Their reality is simply trying to feed, clothe and educate themselves day after day, year after year, so that they do not repeat the seemingly endless cycle of poverty and sickness that took their parents away. The need is great but with the help of SOS Children's Villages there just might be a future for children who have no-one else to turn to.

For privacy reasons we have changed the names of the children.