School meals: caring for Lesotho's AIDS orphans

14 July 2006 Listening to her life story, one begins to understand why.

Relebohile spent years growing increasingly hungry as, first her mother, and then her father, became every more gravely ill from AIDS before dying a few years ago.

Suddenly, at 15, Relebohile was the head of her household and she had to fend for herself and her 11 year old brother, Teboho. “I wasn’t ready to be in charge,” she says. “But I had to do it.”

Despite childhoods cut short, Relebohile and Teboho are, oddly enough, better off in many ways today than they have been for many years because of their involvement with CARE.

As she recounts this story, Relebohile pauses to wipe tears away with the red and white striped necktie of her school uniform. “I am hurting,” she says apologetically, “because I remember how we lived before. We were struggling those last few years. Father was very sick and couldn’t do much for us. It was impossible to have enough food to eat.”

Tholoana Letsie, who works for CARE, said: “We realized that a lot of children were not coming to school at all because of hunger and that many kids who did come would fall asleep and have trouble concentrating because they had not eaten.”

That was situation Relebohile and her brother Teboho were in over the last years of their parents’ lives. They attend Likuena High School, just down the hill from their two-room home in village of Thoteng. Now, they get a meal every day from the school garden and they have also been trained by CARE to grow their own garden at home.

Of Likuena’s 791 students, 84 are 'double orphans' like Relebohile and Teboho, while 234 other students, so far, have lost just once parent.

“We didn’t have money to buy food before,” says Relebohile while weeding her home garden of carrots, beets, carrots and peach trees. “We used to fetch wild vegetables. The vegetables from school and our garden at home have helped us very much.”

There are no more tears – only clear-eyed determination – when Relebohile speaks of her future. “When I was growing up I would go to the clinic with my mother or father and there would always be long lines of sick people waiting for help. I decided then that I want to be a doctor and travel through the villages to help people who are sick.”

The first step to Relebohile’s dream has come true. She has just got a place at Lesotho’s national university.

by Kenneth Walker