COLUMN ONE : In Uganda, a Scourge on Families : AIDS has ravaged the nation, creating a generation of children raising other children. They struggle to hold stricken homes together, relying on their wits and makeshift support groups.

By JOHN BALZAR

Nov. 18, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

KAMPALA, Uganda —

In a not-so-terrible banana-grove slum known as Tank Hill, an adobe shanty weathers and slowly crumbles in the sun. The shanty has three rooms, no electricity or water, empty window frames and a tin roof where spears of light descend through rust holes. Here, at the fringe of Uganda’s capital, we are promised we will see a marvel.

At the doorstep is a teen-age girl with oversize eyes and straightforward dreams. This is her home, which she shares with her brothers and sisters, the youngest a toddler. And 150 white chickens. The chickens have one room all to themselves.

The walls are barren except for a pencil drawing by one brother who has polio and cannot walk. One of the sisters is also a polio victim. The chickens squawk all the time, but this comforts 19-year-old Catherine Nambudye. A charcoal brazier glows underneath a pot of cornmeal, bubbling hard. Food is a comfort too.

This is the marvel, the simplest of things: a modern African family reshaped but enduring against the curse of “the new slavery,” as some call it. What that means is that AIDS is taking away the strong and productive. The children remain to find their own way, sometimes with the help of the old.

Without shyness, Catherine explains:

“Altogether, we are seven. I am the first-born. The youngest is 3. Our father died in 1991. Our mother died this year in June. Both died of AIDS. We are doing OK now. My mother started training me early to look after the others. So when this happened, I was not scared.

“Sometimes, yes, I’m disturbed by so many things. I don’t struggle just for my life but for the whole family. If I didn’t do this, what would happen to these children? . . . When my mother died, she said, ‘Take care of them.’ So they are now my children, nobody else’s. They are trusted in my hands. I will do my best.”

Half of Uganda’s 16 million people are children, and about 1 million have been orphaned by acquired immune deficiency syndrome, UNICEF estimates. Neighboring Kenya reports 500,000 AIDS orphans, a number expected to double. Before long, there will be 10 million in East and Southern Africa, experts project. And maybe 16 million continent-wide--the equivalent of the population of Texas, young castoffs in the poorest reaches of the world.

AIDS is not just a health calamity for Africa. It is social upheaval at a previously unknown scale.

Farm production is already declining in parts of the continent for lack of fit and skilled adults to work the crops. School enrollment is dropping in some areas as children are left to fend for themselves, and as their teachers die. The educated class is being ruthlessly combed of talent. It was reported recently that a bank in Kampala trained two people for one job to beat the grim odds.

Unmeasurable, and perhaps unimaginable, is the emptiness in the heart of the extended family, Africa’s great saving strength.

The road to Catherine’s house would be called a Jeep trail in the developed world. Father Steve Collins, a sunburned Scot who has lived in Uganda since 1958, is driving, and he has no Jeep. He rams his aging subcompact, skidding and bouncing and groaning, up the rutted pathways of Tank Hill as children screech their hellos.

Says Collins, a jolly, absorbed man with the air of someone living a deeply satisfying life, “We do what we can with God’s help.”

Catherine is evidence of that.

Not only the premature head of a large family, she is the toast of one of scores of neighborhood helping-hand programs emerging all over Africa.

The Roman Catholic priest is one of the sponsors of a local hospital group called AIDS Widows and Orphans Family Support. It was formed because something had to be done with all these children who brought their sick parents to the hospital and then waited wide-eyed and bewildered on the sidewalk while the gurneys rolled out the back door.

By the standards of big-league international relief agencies, the widows and orphans support group is a street-corner runt.

It assists 640 families, trying to provide orphans with the means to support themselves and hold their remnant families together. And it fights against African inheritance laws that tend to overlook children and widows in favor of brothers and uncles.

In Catherine’s case, the support organization gave her the brood stock, feed and vitamins for a poultry business. On these chickens a family clings. Its median age: 11.

And because Catherine showed such promise, the widows and orphans group agreed to pay tuition so she could attend a teachers college. She is a year and three months away from her qualification certificate.

These days, she is up at 5 a.m. to supervise breakfast, then begins her daily dawn walk. To class at 7 a.m. and home at 5:30 p.m. The other school-age children also go to classes paid for by charity. On weekends, Catherine organizes the able-bodied children to weed a 20-by-30-foot garden of corn and potatoes and cassava. The corn is not doing well.

The family is also building a mud coop for the chickens, so it can reclaim the back bedroom. The chickens provide eggs and meat for sale. The whole family is learning the poultry business. The proceeds buy food and kerosene for the house lamp and pay for a daytime baby-sitter for the toddler and more chicken feed.

It is a struggle. But not without its joys. Catherine sings in a church choir on Sunday, and the absence of toys is overcome by the younger boys, who can fashion a pretty fair soccer ball from banana leaves and scrap paper.

Their lives will never be quite normal. Catherine’s in particular. She will never have a husband. What man could accept the burden of such a large family right at the start? And, she vows, she will never even have a boyfriend, somebody to hold her hand and tell her she is pretty.

“I cannot do those things. I saw my parents die. If I die, what will happen to these young children? OK, death is there. I will die. But not the way my parents died,” she says earnestly.

Catherine is not infected with HIV. “I’m not so sure about this young boy,” she says, holding the wet-nosed 3-year-old on her lap. “And the girl who is now 7, I wonder about her too.”

Still, these youngsters are manifestly better off than most orphan families of Africa. If one in 10 children in Uganda is parent-less, only one in 10 of those receives any outside help, and probably not one in 5,000 is as lucky or determined as these children, experts in Africa say.

More typically, such a family disintegrates. Older children drift onto the mean streets of Kampala, where they compete with flocks of giant marabou storks for choice leavings in garbage bins. The younger ones are parceled out to aunts or grandparents where they are first to be put to work and last to receive a chance to attend school. The new serf generation.

Bernadette Olowo-Freers is the AIDS program officer for UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency, in Kampala. “Even educated families are in distress. Say there are three or four grown-up siblings, and AIDS takes two or three. The survivor suddenly has responsibility for all their children,” she says. Then she pauses for a double breath.

“The story I am telling you is my story. I have two children. I lost three brothers. Now I have 13 children more to feed and put into school. . . . Most of my colleagues do this same thing. School here is not free. It is very expensive.”

She continues: “I hope you can convey that not all is lost, however. Ugandans are trying. Retired people are coming back to work to teach a second generation the essential skills that they passed on once to a dead generation. . . . In places, widows have grouped together to sustain a village. The spirit of sharing has been activated. People no longer say, ‘That’s your problem.’ People now ask, ‘How can I help?’

“AIDS has been an awful thing--but let’s see if we can get something out of it.”

According to the United Nations, 70% of the world’s AIDS cases are in Africa. The east and south are most devastated. And Uganda is ground zero--because of both the staggering toll and the public determination to face the crisis without shame or reservation.

“Uganda has become the symbol of AIDS in Africa because the epidemic is mature there. But the disease and its impacts are much broader,” says Tshidi Moeti, health adviser for UNICEF’s regional headquarters in Nairobi. “In southern Africa, in particular, it is a bitter irony. These countries are the bright lights of the continent, South Africa and Botswana and Swaziland, and I’m afraid they are heading for a very bad time next.”

To many, the landscape outside Kampala is the most beautiful in Africa, with dense broad-leaf plants seeming to vault right out of the crimson soil. In a clearing on a breezy saddle of land are two whitewashed block houses, and here another handful of young Ugandans is earning a chance in a vocational school sponsored by AIDS Widows and Orphans Family Support.

“My father died in August of 1992. My mother is now sick. It is me who is working. We are seven children. Here, I learned tailoring and embroidery. They gave me a [sewing] machine. With a machine, we cannot be hungry.”

Nineteen-year-old Grace Sanyu is speaking. More evidence of where a helping hand holds a family together. When her father died, the property was claimed by uncles and she, her siblings and mother were cast adrift, to rent a shack in a slum. As Grace calculates it, she will work for 10 years to buy another plot and build a house.

Traveling across town, past a new tourist hotel, past walled compounds of diplomats, past large tents where church services are held, a path leads deeper into the suffering. “Come, I want to show you,” says Beatrice Lubega, a Uganda social worker and director of the AIDS Widows and Orphans Family Support.

You choke on the smell of the Mulago slum before you ever see it. Open foamy sewers, thousands of wet-wood cooking fires, spongy mounds of rotting garbage and the ripeness of people with nowhere to wash themselves. Dwellings are like barnyard stalls, pressing in on dirt walkways barely wide enough for one.

Down a crooked alley an archway is visible, and inside an old woman lies curled on the floor, naked. Actually, she is 30ish, but HIV infection has opened her to every kind of opportunistic tropical disease and made her old.

She is weak and can barely cover herself. The space is eight feet by 10 feet. She sleeps here with five children. And one treasure--a $200 pedal-powered sewing machine. It belongs to her teen-age daughter, bestowed upon graduation from vocational training.

The mother does not want to die in this awful place. The whole family looks to the sewing machine and the first-born child as their hope. Money earned by the machine has gone to buy a $70 plot of land the size of a boxing ring. It is beyond the slum, where flowers grow and the sunlight is not fogged by cook-smoke. With mud bricks and plastic sheeting for a roof, they will have a house. A proper place to die and for the children to live on.

“But look,” she says, and thin tears dribble from anthracite eyes. She unfolds a sheet of paper torn from a steno pad. It is the deed to the new property. Or was the deed. Rats have turned it to Swiss cheese. “What now?” she agonizes.

Well, only the daughter, who is 18, can deal with this--just as soon as she returns with the can of water she must refill each day from a distant well. And as soon as she cooks the dinner and gathers up the other children and leads their prayers. Maybe before she lights the kerosene lamp to begin her night’s sewing.

Each gain is fragile. Every step so small. And where else in all the world is so much weight borne on the shoulders of children alone?

Times researcher Peter Johnson in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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HOW YOU CAN HELP

Organizations that accept donations to help the AIDS orphans of Africa:

AIDS Widows and Orphans Family Support

Beatrice Lubega

Nsambya Hospital, Box 2912

Kampala, Uganda

UNICEF Uganda

Box 7047

Kampala, Uganda