By Emily Addison

I walked slowly into the damp, dingy darkness of the building that epitomized South Africa’s pain. Instantly, I was overpowered by the stench of human waste and disease. Decaying, grimy walls loomed on every side, and, as I squinted in the dim lighting, Nakakele AIDS Orphanage was exposed to me in all its naked horror. This was the place that the abandoned, the dying, and the unloved were brought to fearfully face the torment of AIDS and all the shame it brought. I had come here to voluntarily work for part of the summer, not really knowing what to expect. I couldn’t possibly have imagined or prepared myself for the overwhelming sense of hopelessness that pierced my heart when I entered Nakakele.

The weary nurses, calloused and hardened to the suffering, and too busy to be bothered with a naïve white girl, let me wander where I wanted. I roamed into the children’s ward, where I found about fifty kids between ages two and twelve lying in barred cots that looked like prison cells. As I gazed into each child’s bitter, anxious face, my heart wept unstoppably. I found hatred and fear glaring back at me. Their young eyes asked the silent questions they were forced to live with…“Why did my parents leave me here to die with strangers who don’t even care? Why do I have to watch everyone around me die slowly as I wait for my own agonizing death?” I couldn’t help but wonder what love was in such a place of abhorrence and isolation.

A three-year-old little girl with a beautiful chubby face and a faded pink dress caught my eye. Without even thinking, I swept her up into my arms and embraced her as tightly as I possibly could. Gently, I kissed her soft cheek and smiled into her eyes as tears slid uncontrollably down my face. Compassion and love seemed to carry me across the filthy, cold floor as I danced with her in my arms and sang Frank Sinatra in a hoarse whisper. No matter how much my heart was breaking for these beautiful children, I couldn’t stop smiling, and soon it spread contagiously to the face of my dance partner. Instantaneously every broken piece of injustice and pain melted as her laughter became the melody upon which we dance. The previously dull eyes of the other children were now glued in anticipation and curiosity on the newcomer. Singing as loudly as I could, I danced wildly from cot to cot, doing whatever was necessary to squeeze a precious giggle from each child.

Some of the more mischievous young boys would make faces and then turn away, laughing in embarrassment. Others reached out to touch my “yellow hair” and squirmed for me to pick them up and hold them. Like a starving man reaches for food, they reached for love. The simplest game became an escape from their prison cots. The more we played, the more the unforgettable, death, was forgotten. Their hardened faces were softened with laughter as I taught them songs I sang in my church and poured out unrestrained love. Something deep inside me, so deep it was hard to notice at first, was changing. These children were teaching me a new kind of love – a love that was pure, simple, and selfless.

When I had first entered that room and walked from child to child, I had seen their wounds, their hatred, their sickness. Later, when I left Nakakele, and walked from beautiful face to beautiful face, I saw the vibrant personalities and strength of children I had come to love in the truest way. Their eyes had once been black holes of emptiness; now they held laughter, mischief, and love. The reek I had once found unbearable had become the perfume of joy. It had become the sweet fragrance of worship to God.

In that filthy room that bore the stench of death, something new had pierced through all the darkness and grime of fear. Love. Like inescapable sunshine it had lit up every face and transformed a moment of those lives. That summer I learned a lesson I will never forget. In the smiles of those children, I learned the simplicity of love; in the death of those children, I learned how to live. Their priceless joy in the effortless acts of love reminded me of a verse I had always taken for granted. Jesus loved the little children. I now know what it is to love the little children.

But those beautiful, innocent children, bodies broken by the disease they carry, are only a precious few that will represent in my heart forever the twenty-five million dead victims of AIDS and the forty million more infected. There are millions of dying children living in the shame and inescapable death of AIDS. Picture a child you know – silly, or maybe shy, bubbly and playful, and then over that bright, happy picture I ask you, for just a moment, to paint the black horror of AIDS, and imagine their life day by day being stolen in the most brutal way. That is what is happening across Africa as the priceless purity of children is stolen by pain, hatred, and death. How can we not love the little children? How can we turn away and ignore the ache in their eyes and the silent pleas of infants?

Photographs

By Christine Kwon

A photograph speaks one-thousand words.

But my pictures sing, in tired, far-away voices. They line the walls of my room, and the whispers of little children hush me to sleep. The photos are graced with the tilting silhouettes of children, children who hobble like the towering Pisa of Italy—falling sideways from hunger. This morning I received another package from my mother, and it felt leathery and weather-worn from all the rough handling. My mother is a photojournalist.

The yellow tape peels off easily and a tightly-bound wad of photographs falls into my lap. Her pictures depict landscapes of destruction and waste. There are photographs of buildings in ruins. There are photographs of culture in ruins. But most importantly, there are photographs of human ruins. Grandmothers with Mother Theresa eyes, pupils traced delicately in a cat’s yellow, gape at me under a waterfall of wrinkles. So many pictures of broken mothers, clutching their litters of children, leave me to wonder where are all the fathers? But in times of war, a daddy is an unknown luxury.

The pictures that hang on my wall, though, are the ones of children. The children are like the stick and ball models I assemble in Chemistry class. There is nothing padding their bones. Their skin stretches for miles. I can see their hummingbird hearts thrash against their fragile rib cages. I imagine smuggling them all into my apartment. They could have my bed, they could sleep in the bath tub, they could sleep on the kitchen table and on the sofa. In the morning, bushy-eyed and hungry, they would wake up to the smell of banana pancakes. I would whisk them off to nursery-school. I want to give them everything in the world.

Unfortunately, the very children that haunt my dreams will most likely never know the satisfaction of a warm meal, the nurture of a loving hand, the opportunity that comes with education. Instead, the only feeling that these babies are acquainted with is hunger. Real hunger. Endless, insatiable hunger. The mouths of these little children are cavernous, they could eat up the whole world and still feel hungry. My mother, in a distant voice, tells me how their bones are stunted in growth, how malnutrition paints their skin a rainbow-myriad of colors.

I trace the outline of a little boy’s jutting ribs. On the back of this particular photo, my mother has sketched a brief story about Abdul Samed. His twin sister and he had shared everything. From the womb to their last night together, they were inseparable. They often squirreled away food to present to each other when the other was aching with hunger. They, my mother told me, were tangled in the same blanket, when one morning Abdul woke up to find Amna cold and hard. Cold and hard, he had said. He repeated those two words as a mantra for the rest of the day, trembling.

Amna died, my mother told me, from starvation.

My whole life I’ve been surrounded by children. I take care of the children next door, and I watch them tumble into the playground outside, rattle off multiplication tables, enjoy chocolate pudding and whipped cream as second desserts. I cannot help but compare them to the children my mother send me every month. I have children in Somalia, Yemen, Niger, Sierra Leone, and now, Afghanistan and Iraq. They all have different stories, most too difficult to hear. But there is one common thing that every single child shares, girl or boy: starvation. The hunger is evident everywhere.

Little boys show the camera cool tricks. They can circle the entire lengths of their waists with their skeletal fingers. They can touch the dirty soles of their feet to their ears. Little girls with bird-like legs dance. They twirl to music in their heads, music that no one else can understand. I’ve had the honor of corresponding with such a girl, a few years ago. We wrote and drew pictures for each other. In greatest confidence we told each other our fears and aspirations.

She told me her biggest secret with great pride. “If you don’t want to feel sick”, she had written, “then drink a lot of water. Your belly feels big and you don’t feel sick anymore”. I didn’t know how to answer her revelation. How could she understand that I was not plagued with hunger as she was? That her world was not at all like mine? I didn’t have long to worry about my response, however, when I received notice from her orphanage that she collapsed one day. She was dancing. The man on the phone, in all his nonchalance, was surprised at my grief. This kind of thing is normal, he tried to assure me. He would find me another girl to write to.

I want no more children, however. No more pictures of emaciated girls and boys. My eyes are already open to the destitute life that is the future of every baby born in a third-world country. I’m no photographer, so these are my one-thousand words. I want to expose everyone in America, everyone in a comfortable home, reading this, to understand that the problem of starving children is alive and well. I want everyone to hear the stories of my children. They have nothing to eat so they fill themselves with hope, with dreams. They don’t dare speak their desires, because out loud they are too vulnerable, too easy to destroy. So they whisper them. One-thousand times over. They sing me to sleep and I wake up and live my life.

But their nightmares never cease.