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The UN AIDS Organization states that more than three-and-a-half million children across sub-Saharan Africa have lost both parents to AIDS. Thirteen million more have lost at least one parent to the dreaded disease. The Luo village of Ojola is no exception. Nestled in the slopes overlooking Lake Victoria, Ojola is situated in the heart of Nyanza Province, a region particularly hard hit by AIDS. Bisected by the major trucking route from Uganda to the coast, Nyanza’s inhabitants were among the first Kenyans exposed to the disease. Regional infection rates remain very high; in some districts an estimated one in every three inhabitants is HIV positive.
According to Luo custom, kin should absorb orphans and widows. But villages like Ojola are so devastated by poverty and AIDS that households are stretched to the limit. Most have too many mouths to feed already. In some clans, fights have broken out over who will assume responsibility for the offspring of deceased relatives. A growing number of grieving children are thus left to fend for themselves, attempting to farm, and raise younger siblings on their own.
Syprose Helidah Odero is one of many individuals trying to combat this crisis. A teacher at the St Aloys (Ojola) Primary School, Syprose lost her own husband in April of 1999. She struggled to raise her five children, plus a niece, on her meager teacher’s salary. In November 2002, Syprose wrote to her longtime friend, (Sojourner) Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton, explaining that over the previous six months, the villagers of Ojola had buried ten couples who died of AIDS—parents who left behind many orphans. Unable to “eat a meal without thinking about how these children were suffering,” Syprose took in ten of the children—all under the age of eleven. About six months later, Syprose’s neighbors brought her six more orphans. She did not turn them away. Late in 2005, a one-year old girl, whose young mother was too sick to care for her, was thrown into a pit latrine. The abandoned child was rescued and brought to Syprose, who took her in too.
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