UNICEF
Diaries...
From the UNICEF's site...8 diary entries from Ewan's trip back in December.
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| UNICEF Ambassador Ewan McGregor walking through the rain to visit a
child-headed household in the slum area of Ndirande,
Blantyre. |
“I’ve learned a lot about the struggle children who have lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDS face every day. The lack of food, care, love and medicines. They are no longer statistics to me but little children I’ve met who still had the strength to laugh and smile.
We saw three brothers and a sister who live near Blantyre in a township of sorts, a slum. It was pouring. It was a devastatingly sad visit to these boys’ home, which was a tiny mud hut no bigger than half the size of a small room. I’ve never seen a grimmer sight in my life.
It was dirty, everywhere was covered in filth, and the blankets they sleep on were thick with grime and dirt. There were flies and fleas crawling on every surface, there were pots that had never been cleaned with flies crawling all over the remnants of food in them. The second room was full of junk, the roof was open and the rain was pouring in, and it stank.
The eldest boy was 17, the next boy was 13, I think the third boy was maybe six or seven and they had a one-and-a-half-year-old sister, this tiny little baby girl, and they lived in this hole. Their mother died in October, of AIDS and they’d watched her die. The eldest boy has epilepsy. I just felt bleak and empty and horrible: I couldn’t believe that a baby girl lives here.
The wee boy goes out begging – the 17-year-old who’s in charge of the family now – to try and raise enough money to feed his three siblings. He was covered in scars and cuts and bruises and burns from having fits and falling down. It was an enormously emotionally upsetting day. It certainly told a story of what life is like in Malawi for 700,000 AIDS orphans.”
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| UNICEF Ambassador Ewan McGregor and children at Consol Homes Orphan
Care. |
“We drove to Consol Homes Orphan Care, which is a big centre that UNICEF has helped to support. It’s an incredible place, it really is: different projects within the one centre. There’s a day care centre for little children who’ve been orphaned by AIDS where their grandmother - or whoever is looking after them - can take them. There are some toys – not many, but enough to keep them occupied, and the carers play games with them.
It’s really simple what UNICEF does in these community-based child care centres. The community is in charge of finding and preparing a space for the orphans to be looked after on a day-care type basis. UNICEF sends over supplies: paper, paints and printing things, some educational books for the children, building blocks, a few toys – just very basic things that kids need to behave like kids. The head of the village is responsible for allocating a piece of land to be the garden, and there they grow maize or soy beans, and vegetables with which the carers cook so the kids get at least one proper meal a day.
We met some of the grandmothers and the widows; they’re being taught skills that they can take back to their villages that not only help feed the children they are looking after, but also maybe make them some money. A group of grandmothers were being shown how to pound nuts into a mush and then extract the oil, which they can cook with or sell at the market. Others were being taught how to make soap to sell.
We met this fantastic girl, who was 16 and had lost both her parents to AIDS. She showed us a memory book, where the children can put down their thoughts and feelings about the parents they’ve lost and about how they feel and see themselves now. This girl’s book was full of incredible pictures of flowers and the word love, and a picture of herself playing with a football. She told us she considered herself to be a hero because after her parents died people were encouraging her to marry and have a child. She was 16 and said no, she wanted to stay at school, because one day she wanted to be a driver. Wonderful, really wonderful.” |
“Our first stop was the Kawale Youth Centre. We met a girl called Hope
who’s 14 and she very proudly showed us round. It’s basically a small
room, divided into two: on the right were lots of older boys very
studiously reading newspapers and school text books, and on the other side
of the partition the little kids were sitting on the floor reading
children’s books. And it was so quiet - that’s the first thing that struck
me: they were sitting there, quietly, without any teachers. In Africa, the
kids have first hand experience of why they need
education.” |
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| UNICEF Ambassador Ewan McGregor talking with Hope Ganizini,
fourteen-years-old at the Kawale Youth Centre,
Lilongwe. |
Nearly half of all new HIV/AIDS infections occur in young people between 15 and 24. In order to reduce new infection amongst young people UNICEF is scaling up its projects that give access to knowledge on HIV/AIDS and life skills for young people in and out of school. UNICEF’s ‘youth friendly’ projects help to raise awareness and give out information on HIV/AIDS to young people. UNICEF funds 50 of these ‘youth friendly services’ in Malawi. They give young people their own space and privacy as well as increased information on reproductive health.
“They have talks where people tell them how to protect themselves against
HIV/AIDS: it seems that one of the most important tools to fight against HIV and
AIDS in Africa is educating children and young people on the truth about it –
what it is and how you get it, how you can prevent yourself from getting
it.”
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| UNICEF Ambassador Ewan McGregor with Dorica Makiyi and her newborn
baby, Ndirande District Hospital,
Blantyre. |
“There are an estimated 511,000 births a year in Malawi with 95 per cent of pregnant women attending ante-natal clinics. Without care, one in three of Malawi’s HIV positive pregnant mothers will pass the virus on to their newborn babies during gestation, delivery or through breast milk. Since 2001, more than 40,000 pregnant women have accessed UNICEF’s prevention of mother to child transmission (PMTCT) services, receiving voluntary HIV/AIDS testing and counselling, infant feeding advice, improved delivery care practices, and quality post-natal and follow-up care.
UNICEF is working in hospitals all across Africa to provide medicines to stop mother-to-child transmission of HIV through childbirth. It’s really effective and very simple. The mother is given an anti-retroviral drug during labour, then the baby is given the drug in syrup form for the first two to three months of his life.
We travelled to the Ndirande District Hospital. They do pre-natal HIV screening for all pregnant women now, unless they’ve asked not to have it. Then they’ll be given counselling when they find out whether the test is positive or negative. There was a group of about 30 women sitting on benches in the quite large, dusty hall.
We were asked if we wanted to see one of these ladies having her HIV test. So I said, yes let’s go – and it was a tiny space. Suddenly I was standing inches away from this woman who was being counselled on what will happen if her test is positive. I felt really in the way, but the nurse and the lady who was being tested seemed fairly oblivious and carried on regardless. We asked the lady about her set-up: she was married, she had three children already, and she was pregnant with her fourth child. This was her second AIDS test – she had one before her third child was born, which was negative. I felt for sure that they would be negative this time too.
When we went back into the room the nurse talked to her in the local dialect for quite a long time. There was no reaction on the lady’s face. Then the nurse explained to us what was going on, she said that this test was positive, and I realised that this woman had just been told she carried the HIV virus and I was completely gob-smacked. It felt really wrong to be there. I tried to edge my way out and I stood in the doorway staring at this woman, trying to see what her reaction was, and kind of projecting what I assume my reaction would be on to her, I suppose. It’s very difficult to know whether the women are not showing their emotions for cultural reasons or maybe it's ignorance of the disease, but there doesn’t seem to be that worry about HIV here. Maybe they think the ARV drugs are miracle drugs which means it doesn’t affect your life as much as we know that it will. She said her husband had had the test but wouldn’t tell her what the results were.
UNICEF thinks that maybe less than 10 per cent of HIV-positive women giving birth to children are receiving the anti-retroviral treatment during labour. It’s a shockingly low percentage.”
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| UNICEF Ambassador Ewan McGregor showing children images of
themselves on his digital camera in Cedric Village near
Blantyre. |
“Next we travelled to Cedric Village, which had another community-based child care centre. It was very different to the one we saw up north at Consul homes. The children were sadder. It was a sadder place. The one we went to yesterday up near Lilongwe was very positive and optimistic and seemed quite shiny, but although we were welcomed equally here it was a quieter place, people seemed less hopeful.
The food crisis is much more serious here in the south and there’s also more AIDS. And it’s reflected in the faces of the people we met, and the children we saw. There were lots and lots and lots of small children there – easily 150. The slightly older children were learning how to use clay and were making things they would like to own, like mobile phones and radios. One boy said he would like to have a radio so he was making it out of clay. And again, there were widows and grandmothers sitting in the shade. The little kids were playing with things that you could find lying around – tin cans that they put sand in and a bit of water; they were playing at cooking and things like that.
Inside, their centre was the perfect example of one of the community-based children’s centres that UNICEF has been raising money for: it showed how little you need to make these children’s lives better. They’re using an old church building, so there wasn’t the cost of building a new one.
One group of children was drawing on paper with coloured pencils. Next to them was a group of children painting with paint brushes on paper, and the paint that they were using was made from the earth and clay surrounding the centre. And you could tell – the colours were all African earth colours. Then there were some children playing with building blocks that looked like they had been carved from wood that had been found lying around, so again that didn’t cost any money. There was a little sleeping room, there were some books – very few books, maybe 10 or 15 – and there was a bunch of kids reading quietly. And then down the way children were writing on slate boards with chalk.
The room must have had 100 children in, and they were playing, they were able to act like children, which is what they deserve to do. It was a fantastic feeling, it made me feel very proud – and very amazed at the strength of the people who look after the kids: these guys are all volunteers and they come from the community to help out because the children need it. Awesome.”
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| UNICEF Ambassador Ewan McGregor with a three-month-old baby Stella
Kantedza at Queen Elizabeth Hospital,
Blantyre. |
“Our last day today, and we visited Queen Elizabeth Hospital, one of the biggest in Malawi. There were a lot of British doctors there, and it’s run by an English woman. These doctors are amazing, unbelievable. We were in there for an hour and a half, maybe two hours, but the idea of being there day in and day out working with absolutely nothing – sometimes no drugs, sometimes no staff, and it’s absolutely cramped – well, it’s unbelievable. But the care that’s given is extraordinary, and although the statistics are terrible in terms of babies that die there – I think it’s at least one a day – there are babies who are made better.
I asked the doctors what percentage of children with HIV are seen here, do you think? They said they were seeing the tip of the iceberg, that for every baby they saw there were countless others in villages who weren’t being treated at all. Sometimes there are 300 babies a day in the paediatric ward, who are malnourished or who have AIDS, or both. Three hundred babies a day, so they’re stretched to the limit, but my God they’re amazing people.”
Diary entry seven:
“In the nutrition rehabilitation unit, which is sponsored by UNICEF, they’re dealing with children who are severely malnourished. The first thing they have to do is to allow the salt to get back into the blood, so for the first couple of days they don’t start feeding them up. They have to stabilise their bodies and get them ready to accept food again. If they get them through those critical first two days, by the time the baby has an appetite again they’re sent home. The doctor was saying that in our country they would keep them for much, much longer, but they have to send them home because there are so many other babies coming in behind them.
We met a very special child. We called him the bouncing boy because he was dancing around, but his mother lay very close to death; she had TB and AIDS.
She was 22, and had given birth to her son when she was 10. She was lying there holding his hand and she was coughing and coughing; she had the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen – she was a beautiful woman. But she was lying on a mattress that was uncovered and her possessions were all over the place, and it was clear that there was no-one looking after her. I asked the doctor, what’s going to happen to the little boy? The doctor shrugged. So when the lady dies, I said, that little boy, who’s 12, is just going to walk out of the hospital? And she said, yeah.
So now we’ve met AIDS orphans, and today we’ve met a little boy who’s about to become one.
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| UNICEF Ambassador Ewan McGregor with three HIV-positive young
people who work to raise awareness about the disease at the Thondwe Youth
Centre. |
“We visited so many different projects and places and met so many wonderful people, but it’s almost at a point where my brain can’t take in any more pain and suffering. The last thing we saw was a lovely youth centre. We met a great guy who’d lost both his sisters to AIDS, and who now looked after their six children. He was 32 years old and got married recently and is expecting his first child soon too.
He said “you can’t just walk away from your responsibilities”, which I admired because I’ve heard lots of stories about men who have done just that and walked away from their responsibilities. Now he ran this youth centre where they did voluntary HIV tests, and had a support group.
We met three incredible people who had tested HIV positive: a boy of 17, and women of 22 and 32. They were all unmarried and without children, but as soon as they found out they were HIV positive they decided to tell everybody and to go into the communities to try to educate people about prevention. They seemed really at peace.
I’m convinced that the most important thing of all is knowledge, and education. My hope is that we’ve have seen the peak of HIV and AIDS in Malawi on this trip and in 50 years time we’ll look back and say it’s history.
Children from this youth group put on a play: they used acting and theatre as a way of spreading the word and dispelling myths about HIV and AIDS. Everything that we learnt over the last four days was one way or another, in this play. And I looked round at the faces of the hundreds of children watching, and I hoped in my heart that they wouldn’t have to go through some of the things I’ve seen since I’ve been here, that this new generation will know about AIDS and will not sleep around and will use condoms when they have sex, and that AIDS will wane and Africa can become strong again. I really hope that. I really hope that.”
Pictures by: Caroline Irby for UNICEF 2005.
Source: UNICEF