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Back to school campaign focused on HIV/AIDS orphans
August 24, 2007
SOS children’s Villages ‘Back to School’ campaign seeks to provide for orphaned children through providing some daily lives necessities and scholarships for them to attend schools. In Zimbabwe 1 in 5 children is said to be an orphan of HIV/AIDS, and thousands of Zimbabweans die daily, causing it to be host to the highest number of orphans in the world, programs such as Back to School are needed. And as this epidemic continues to rip through African countries teachers at SOS schools speak on the effect that has on them, and their classrooms.
“It’s quite alarming. Nearly three-quarters of my class are orphaned,” says Mr. Mashang a special education teacher at SOS Children’s Villages Hermann Gmeiner Primary school in the northwest of Zimbabwe. “These pupils often lack love and they need to find that it is love that is lacking. Most of the children in my class who are orphaned seem to need extra moral support to boost their confidence,” says Mrs Muripira a second grade teacher at the same school. As these teachers continue to teach orphaned aids children, they understand that with the lack of a parental figure in these children’s life, education even more important. They further more understand that school might be an extra weight for those children to deal with, and seek to skillfully gear their attention towards learning.
However as the situation of orphans worsens throughout Zimbabwe and like African countries, acting heads of schools such as Mrs Gombakomba are left to comment “The situation is pathetic. Children have to learn to be adults before their time. If you talk to these children they have stories that will move your heart. What is the world coming to? We are going to end up in a world full of ’small adults’.”
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