For AIDS orphans, lessons on life - and car repair

For businessman Yasin Mbuka, life used to be all about making a profit. Back then, he toiled hard to expand his budding businesses - a grocery store and a car-repair garage. "I was somebody who would stand alone," he says, and not think much about others.

But that was before both he and his beloved wife got sick - and before his businesses were plundered by increasingly desperate employees. "It was before we knew about this pandemic," he says, referring to AIDS.

Now his wife, many of his friends, and his businesses are gone. But amid the loss, Mr. Mbuka has found a new way to function. In the shell of his old garage a few weeks ago he opened a car-mechanic school for orphans - for kids who, like more than 12 million African children, have lost their parents to AIDS.

Every morning, 27 young people pile into Mbuka's dusty courtyard. They start the day by expressing gratitude to God, by hoisting aloft a rusted Ford gearbox for exercise, and by hearing bits of wisdom from a gentle widower. "The little I have," he says, describing his new focus in life, "I have to share with these young kids."

Each morning, after this Muslim man leads the mostly Christian students in generic prayers, he exhorts them with things like, "Don't go in for smoking and drinking," and "avoid sexual intercourse."

In all, 12.1 million children in Africa and more than 15 million worldwide have lost their parents to AIDS, the UN says. At current rates, there could be 20 million AIDS orphans by 2010.

There are many efforts to help them. Just up the road in this small nation in southeastern Africa, a school and orphanage that cares for 700 children is funded by a professor and students at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. In South Africa, Oprah Winfrey has brought support and gifts to thousands of orphans. Across Africa the UN children's agency, UNICEF, backs programs such as "junior farmers," which teach kids the agricultural skills their parents didn't have the time to pass along.

But Mbuka's new school is a home-grown effort that emerged out of one man's desire to help the children of his departed friends. Many of those friends, in this country where 14 percent of adults are diagnosed HIV-positive, were felled by AIDS. "When it came to my mind that I should assist my friends by helping their children, I couldn't ignore it," says Mbuka, clad in a Pierre Cardin dress shirt, a relic of his prosperous past.

His effort is among the most-effective kind, experts say. "Interventions that are home-based and community-based and have a life of their own" rather than being imported and supported from outside "are the ones that work best," says Sarah Crowe of UNICEF's regional office in South Africa.

After hearing bits of Mbuka's wisdom, the kids take turns hoisting the gearbox, which weighs about 40 pounds and is from a 1970s Ford. "You must exercise to be strong in body - and in mind," instructs Mbuka. He joins them in lifting, which is remarkable, given that in 2001 he himself weighed just 119 pounds. "I never dreamed I could again hold a thing so heavy," he says.

Page: 1 | 2