MUNALI VILLAGE, Zambia, 21 November 2002 — Elvin Mudyakuvinda is selling her two young daughters to help feed the other eight children in her care. She says it is her last remaining option after being forced to sell everything she owned — livestock, household cutlery and clothes — to raise money for food.
Like many Zambians in the drought-hit southern African country, Mudyakuvinda is caught in a cycle of poverty and hunger. But as families act out of desperation to seek a "bride price" for their daughters, their actions are plunging Zambia into an AIDS crisis which has devastated its social fabric. Once young children are forced into marriages, and sometimes into polygamy, they are equally exposed to HIV-AIDS.
Mudyakuvinda’s two daughters up for sale — Memory, 8, and Hildah, 13, — have already been taken out of school. Persistent hunger deprived them of the energy to walk the five kilometers to school.
Now they help their mother collect wood to manufacture charcoal which they try to sell to motorists on the main highway from Lusaka to the southern resort town of Livingstone. But there are no takers: she has not sold any charcoal in almost two weeks.
"This is why I have to marry my children. If anybody comes and wants them and can pay the money I need, they will take them away. It pains me that I have to do this but I have no option," she says.
For her daughters, any interested suitors would have to pay 600,000 Kwacha (150 pounds sterling) per child. This would guarantee her family some food for the next few months.
According to Stella Goings, the UN children’s fund (UNICEF) resident director in Zambia, at least 20 percent of the country’s 11 million people are infected with the AIDS virus and at the current rate of infections, Zambia could soon be among the countries with the highest levels of HIV infections.
UNICEF estimates that at least 75 percent of all families in Zambia have taken in one or more AIDS orphans. Goings said the world had to realize that the hunger crisis afflicting three million Zambians and at least 14 million people in the entire southern Africa region was directly linked to AIDS. Any attempt to address the hunger crisis without at the same time tackling the AIDS issue was completely missing the point.
"It’s a vicious cycle. It begins with children being sold through child labor, prostitution and early marriages., then it ends up with the parents themselves selling them to earn money," said Goings.
"The ensuing high risk behavior leads to HIV which then leads to decreased productivity." The crisis has left many parents and their children too sick to farm, leaving them dependent on outside aid.
"So if we take HIV out and provide mountains of food, we are not solving the problem. We have to break the AIDS cycle and get rid of high risk behavior since people are being forced into this situation," Goings said.
Once in a forced marriage, the girls have to stay put, regardless of the extent of abuse against them by their husbands, as parents cannot afford to pay back the bride prices.
At Simukombo Basic School in the poverty stricken Kazungula district of southern Zambia, teachers explained how 12 girls of between 8 and 13 had dropped out of school to get into early marriages to help their parents get food from bride prices. This plunged the children into the AIDS trap immediately. (The Independent)
