https://www.dailymail.co.

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LAND OF A MILLION ORPHANS: DailyMail.com

investigates the hidden African crisis driven by AIDS and
meets ‘children raised by children’ left behind in Zambia
• PART 1 OF AN EXCLUSIVE 3-PART SERIES; READ PART 2 AND PART 3
• Zambia is a land-locked nation in sub-Saharan Africa whose population of 17 million includes 1 million
orphans, according to the United Nations Development Programme
• AIDS killed an entire generation of parents, leaving the country with half its population younger than 18;
DailyMail.com traveled there to meet children in two slums in the capital city
• Hundreds of thousands of children there sleep in overcrowded one-room shacks or under plastic tarps
• One in 13 Zambians will die before age 5, and many kids don’t know their parents or their own birthdays
• More than 1.2 million Zambians live with HIV; new cases are 29 times as common as in the United States and
53 times the United Kingdom’s rate
• Sexual abuse is rampant; some tribes’ cultures teach that sex with a virgin can cure AIDS, driving child rape
and more HIV infections
• You can learn more about humanitarian crises in Zambia from UNICEF, UNAIDS, the PEPFAR program or
Family Legacy

By DAVID MARTOSKO FOR DAILYMAIL.COM IN LUSAKA, ZAMBIA

PUBLISHED: 9 July 2019
With photography by DAVID MARTOSKO FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

When the bacteria that started eating a hole through Richard’s right leg at age 11 began
attacking his tibia bone, he thought he would die like the others. ‘It started on its own,’ he says.
‘It was bad. I was thin, I couldn’t walk.’

Richard was 15. For four years he had watched and waited in the Kanyama slums of Lusaka,
Zambia. In the shadow of third-world slaughterhouses, healers from his native Tumbuka tribe
worked their powders and charms. When the draining wound made it too painful to stand,
and walking to school was a pointless memory, his grandmother took him to the only pediatric
infectious disease specialist in the country – without any money in her pocket.

‘A chunk of bone came out, almost like a fist,’ the American doctor who saved Richard’s life
recalls. The stubborn germs had slowly obliterated what had held it together. Round-the-clock
IV antibiotics continued for months.

Richard, now 18, is one of the lucky ones. Even as he awaited amputation or death in Lusaka,
he had a makeshift roof over his head and the one adult from his extended family who could

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Land of a million orphans: Benjamin, a Zambian boy in the Buseko Market slum of the capital city Lusaka,
doesn’t know his father and he contracted HIV, his step-aunt believes, from his now-deceased mother’s breast
milk (DailyMail.com is not publishing the surnames of any children in this report)

be found. His grandmother idled with him for years while she watched over his brothers and
sisters.

‘My mother, I don’t know where she is now,’ Richard tells me, ‘but my father is dead.’

A more devastating infection, AIDS, took him.

Richard is among Zambia’s 1 million orphans, the United Nations Development Programme
reports. They live in a land-locked nation of 17 million people that is about the size of Texas. The
United States, with its 327 million people, has about 443,000 children in foster care, according
to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Most of Zambia’s orphans are collateral damage of a well-understood AIDS epidemic. The
outside world hasn’t, however, grappled with the staggering number of children left without
mothers and fathers. UNICEF puts that total at 52 million throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

In countries like Zambia, where help from the developed world came too late, children raise
children in trash heaps and chicken coops, or under discarded plastic tarps.

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Zambia is a nation that has lost a generation of adults to the AIDS pandemic, leaving behind what the UN
Development Programme says are 1 million orphans including many groups of children who band together in
Lusaka to ‘raise’ each other in what amounts to a feral lifestyle

One million in a nation of 17 million people. The impact is staggering.

The same ratio would give the U.S. more than 19 million orphans, matching the combined
populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix.

The developed world brought AIDS under control a quarter-century ago. In Zambia it robbed
an entire generation of its fathers, mothers, big brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and
godparents. Today more than half the country’s population is younger than 18.

Children who wander the streets here, castaways in their own country, don’t know where they
are from. Few know their own birthdays. The grinding poverty in Zambia’s capital city can be
measured in hundreds of thousands of their lives, or one at a time.

There’s Benjamin, whose thousand-mile stare looks past the father he never knew and the
mother who, his step-aunt says, gave him HIV through her breast milk.

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Barefoot and ragged children are everywhere in Lusaka’s charitably named ‘compounds,’ in reality bleak
shantytowns

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Victoria, says an older boy, is seven but she speaks no English ‘and only a little Nyanja,’ the most
common tribal language in Lusaka.

Tamara beams for photos but can’t say where she sleeps. Her name means ‘some loved ones are
no longer with us’ in the Bantu dialect spoken in Zambia’s easternmost province, where her home
village could be. She doesn’t know.

Barefoot and ragged kids are everywhere.

LIFE IN THE SLUMS

Seven in 10 Lusaka residents live in ‘compounds,’ charitably named shantytowns where most of
America’s poor would be envied as polished elites. The euphemism evokes military order and
security, but these are among the world’s most shambolic slums.

In Chainda, one of the more developed of the improvised skid rows, a 30-something woman says
she lives in a single room with her six children, plus three more girls who belonged to her sister,
who died from AIDS-related pneumonia.

Sound the alarm: In another slum, Buseko Market, parentless teens raise parentless children on the street
– where they sleep on fanned-out bundles of dried tall grass and make brooms from them to sell after they
wake up

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Richard, an 18-year-old who lost his father to AIDS and doesn’t know whether his
mother is alive, was lucky enough to live with his grandmother from early childhood
– but contracted an aggressive infection that nearly cost him his leg; he shows his
scars from where a chunk of bone came out during the first of several surgeries

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Video: Homeless live on the streets in Zambia’s Buseko Market slum

Those three children sit alone. Having a parent who perished from AIDS is considered shameful,
socially branding these unlucky children. They bury their heads when I pick up my camera.

‘I do not know them and I cannot help them,’ says the woman, whose name is Fatima. ‘They
come, they eat, they go.’

Flies swarm around the faded blue washtub where Fatima squeezes soapy water into children’s
clothing while she insists my lens cap must stay put: ‘No snaps here. No snaps.’ Two of her boys
are shirtless, along with one of her girls.

It’s winter in Zambia. Parched and 70 degrees Fahrenheit, 50 at night.

A metal pipe and faucet stick out of the ground where a borehole struck liquid gold ten yards
away. Mud-streaked ten-gallon water jugs surround it. Driving through the city and inventorying
hand-painted billboards, the most advertised business is drilling for water. Mosquito control
is a close second. Green murals promoting a brand called ‘Doom’ provide Chainda’s brightest
splashes of color.

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Zambia is a land-locked African country whose Third-World-ness hides its status as an oasis for Congolese
fleeing war and Zimbabweans escaping economic collapse; but because AIDS condemned a generation of
adults, Zambia’s median age is under 18

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Soccer is the number one sport in in Lusaka’s slums but children there seldom have balls to play
with; they wrap plastic bags around each other into a multilayered sphere and then melt the outside
together

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Off-brand Crocs and other sandals are the most common footwear, but about half of the kids were barefoot
on one late June afternoon – the middle of Zambia’s winter

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A map published in the journal Nature this year shows the extent of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa in dramatic
detail; the purple areas, with the highest rates of infection, include Botswana, Zimbabwe, portions of South
Africa and about half of Zambia

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On a trip through Lusaka it’s impossible to avoid garbage piles like this one; middle-class Zambians in gated
communities complain about the smell but children grow immune to it and play there

Down the dirt street comes a boy in a faded Seattle Seahawks t-shirt, a castoff from some less-
than-Super Bowl year. He’s shuffling in a pair of off-brand Crocs behind a makeshift soccer ball
fashioned from plastic grocery bags, wrapped into a sphere and melted together with a gas
torch. It unravels bit by bit.

Esther, a three-year-old, clings to my leg. A skinny boy wraps bony arms around me.

‘I am King. But it’s only my name,’ he says. ‘Not a real king.’

King is 10 years old but looks to be six. Many 14-year-olds in Chainda can pass for 10. The six-
year-olds appear four at most. Malnutrition has shortened and stunted them.

Mary, a hair-matted girl in a filthy beach t-shirt, can’t stop her quivering dance against the
backdrop of charcoal sellers, one of the few obvious businesses in this grid of hovels. In another
makeshift storefront, a man sells liquor in 100 milliliter bottles.

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Video: Rescued Zambian orphan girls sing gospel music in Lusaka

Holly Scurry, the chief relationship officer at a Christian charity called Family Legacy, says one
dirt-caked child there told her he wanted God to show him ‘what it felt like to be clean.’

Family Legacy operates 26 schools in and around Lusaka, educating 15,000 children. The group
also cares for nearly 800 orphans full-time, taking the hardest cases out of the slums and giving
them their own bed, three meals a day and a safe place to grow up.

But the compounds loom just minutes away. Piles of charcoal dot the street corners there,
supplied by gangs of young boys who venture into the nearby countryside to burn down
forests, one stand of trees at a time. Smoke plumes are visible from hilltops all day, every day.
Glowing charcoal is the key ingredient in virtually all cooking.

A government pension fund owns the land, so no one watches it. It was fenced off until
someone stole the fence.

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Holly Scurry is the public face of Family Legacy, a Texas-based charity that has
built 64 homes to care for nearly 800 Zambian orphans, and 26 schools to edu-
cate 15,000 children in the compounds

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Market stalls in Buseko used to provide sleeping cover for most of the population, but after many burned
down the lumber-sellers took over and evicted nearly everyone; water for locals comes from a communal
well, distributed in grubby plastic jugs

MORE THAN ONE AT A TIME

Buseko Market, one of the city’s most everything-strapped ghettos, is worse. Market stalls
double as housing for some. The accident-prone set fires. Riots break out over territorial
squabbles and who should tend to the ever-present trash heaps. Lumber and roofing sellers
have displaced hundreds, who sleep along the roads.

Blackened, grimy sewage ditches separate humans from trucks, with makeshift gangplanks the
only way across. Sanitation is practically nonexistent and a 30-something woman named Mary
says the one public toilet within a half-hour’s walk ‘is too dangerous.’ The unsavory lurk there. It’s
well-lit but costs money.

Stenches come and go with anemic breezes, seesawing from diesel exhaust to human waste
and back again. The taste settles on the tongue. Vermin have free rein. The locals trap some rats
for food.

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Video: Prince Harry gave inspirational speech to young Zambians in 2018

As the sun sets, children by the dozen return from the innards of the slum dragging clouds
of dust. No grown-ups call their names. They will sleep beneath fanned-out bales of dried tall
grass, near adults who make brooms of the material to sell in the daylight.

A young woman with her hair in braids, perhaps 20, idles outside a pint-size shack covered in
corrugated steel. Asked who lives there, a man named Chanda points and offers a broad grin.

‘Mahule,’ he says. Prostitutes. It’s a word that means more than one at a time. A teenage girl
emerges for a moment to join the young woman. Chanda asks me for money.

A residence in a Lusaka compound, for anyone with a residence, can be a single stuccoed room
covered in tin or draped with a plastic tarp, and a few bricks outside to frame a spot for burning
charcoal so a woman can cook. Like two-thirds of Zambians, she and her extended bunch have
no electricity.

They sleep six or eight or twelve abreast, concentration-camp style. Girls are routinely evicted
while they are on their periods, sent to sleep outside as ‘unclean’ – even the girls who aren’t the
heirs of the dead.

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Tamara’s name means ‘some loved ones are no longer with us,’ an example of the tribal custom of
naming children to describe the circumstances of their births

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‘I am King,’ one boy in Chainda says, ‘but it’s only my name. Not a real king.’ He goes to a school built and run by
a Texas-based Christian charity

Women in Zambia’s fast-growing cities average four children apiece. In rural villages, where a
large family is a form of old-age social security, seven or eight is common.

Polygamy is officially illegal but widely practiced under tribal laws. My airport taxi driver speaks
reverently about a fellow cabbie who was a village chief before he came to Lusaka, and now has
three wives and ‘more than 15 children.’

‘He built a house for two of them,’ he says, ‘but the thin one lives with him. He buys them all
chickens. They are very happy.’

In the compounds, though, it’s typical for a woman to be the only adult in a household, and
ordinary for her to sell her body to feed the children, who see everything. They become
sexualized at a young age. They act out what they see. The girls have babies, often lured by
older men who carry HIV.

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Zambia’s population pyramid (left) is heavily weighted toward young people (at the bottom), while the AIDS
epidemic has left fewer adults alive at the top; by comparison, the U.S. pyramid (right) shows a more evenly
distributed population with bulges corresponding to baby boomers and millennials

Smoke plumes are visible all day, every day in government-owned land near Lusaka as roving gangs of boys
burn down tree after tree for charcoal to sell; this area was fenced off until someone stole the fences

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Other than hand-painted signs for water-drillers, the most visible indications of commerce in Lusaka’s Chainda
slum are bright green murals advertising insecticides

A myth among Zambia’s biggest tribal ethnic groups is that sex with a virgin can cure a man
with AIDS. Many rape the young, girls and boys alike, and infect those who weren’t HIV-
positive from birth.

The cycle begins again, slowed only by the ultimate cruelty: One in 13 children in Zambia will
die before age five.

There is a way forward. A few charities are building up the least, the last and the lost to write
Zambia’s next chapter and take the place of the adults whose stories ended too soon.

Back in his tiny hovel, Richard still lived in constant agony. But an American doctor he had
never met was about to change his life.

‘LAND OF A MILLION ORPHANS’ IS A 3-PART SERIES; READ PART 2 AND PART 3

You can learn more about humanitarian crises in Zambia from UNICEF, UNAIDS, the
PEPFAR program or Family Legacy.

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George W. Bush pushed the PEPFAR program through Congress in 2003; its $80 billion of expenditures so far
are the largest commitment any nation has ever made toward eradicating a single disease; on July 4, 2012 the
former U.S. president and his wife Laura visited Lusaka’s Kasisi Children’s Home, which cares for 230 orphans –
a drop in the bucket (Shealah Craighead for The Bush Presidential Center)

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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7229473/

LAND OF A MILLION ORPHANS: Meet the charity that’s taking

in the most hopeless of Zambia’s left-behind children and the
American doctor who saves boys and girls raised ‘in chicken
coops’ – and saw a single rabid dog ‘kill 11 kids’
• PART 2 OF AN EXCLUSIVE 3-PART SERIES; READ PART 1 AND PART 3
• The AIDS pandemic wiped out a generation of adults in Zambia, a land-locked African nation, leaving
1 million orphans behind
• DailyMail.com traveled there to meet children in the slums of the capital city Lusaka
• More than 1.2 million Zambians still live with HIV, and 1 in 13 die before age 5, a humanitarian disaster that is
repeated all across sub-Saharan Africa
• A Texas-based charity called Family Legacy is teaching 15,000 Zambian children in 26 schools it built, and
housing nearly 800 of the most hopeless in 64 large houses built with American donations
• The organization’s largely Zambian staff hope to turn orphans into doctors and accountants in a country
where just one-third of people have electricity and basic sanitation
• They use a summer camp resembling an U.S. ‘Vacation Bible School’ as a feeder-trough to identify kids who
need social services, schooling, medical care and – for the worst off – relocation
• An American doctor who left a teaching professorship in Alabama now lives there, and is Zambia’s only
pediatric infectious disease specialist
• He sees children who are ‘five years old, 15 pounds, never walked, never talked ... I’ve seen rabies. I’ve seen
one dog kill 11 kids’
• Zambia discourages Westerners from adopting, preferring to keep children in the country rather than risk a
brain-drain; potential adoptive parents must move there for months to foster a child first
• You can learn more about humanitarian crises in Zambia from UNICEF, UNAIDS, the PEPFAR program or
Family Legacy

By DAVID MARTOSKO FOR DAILYMAIL.COM IN LUSAKA, ZAMBIA

PUBLISHED: 10 July 2019
With photography by DAVID MARTOSKO FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

‘It had gotten so painful,’ Dr. Brad Guffey says of Richard’s oozing leg wound. By the time the
boy was 15 ‘he was pretty much taking care of himself.’

‘Richard was changing this massive bandage full of pus twice a day on his own,’ he recalls of
the stoic orphan, wincing at the memory of a scrawny kid treating his own drug-resistant
infection for four years with homemade gauze.

The crippled, skinny teen made first aid supplies out of mutton cloth and strips of chitenge,
the fabric Zambian women like his mother would wrap around themselves like a sarong
during the day.

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A global AIDS pandemic killed millions in Africa, home to two-thirds of the world’s people who are living with
HIV; in the nation of Zambia the HIV virus and its aftereffects wiped out a generation of mothers, fathers, aunts,
uncles, grandparents and godparents, leaving an orphan crisis for the developed world to face – or ignore

Richard’s father is dead, a casualty of HIV. His mother may be, too. He hasn’t seen her since before
his clear-headed memories began.

AIDS took an entire generation of men and women from Zambia, an African nation of 17 million
people. One million of them are orphans, left behind to make it on their own.

First World governments use money like a blunt instrument, and billions of dollars have saved
millions of lives. But it takes the joyful elbow grease of smaller groups to accomplish the finer
needle-work with the survivors.

TWENTY-THREE CHILDREN A DAY

The United States has poured more than $80 billion into the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for
AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the largest commitment a country has ever made to fight a single disease.
More than $3 billion of the total has been earmarked for Zambia.

The biggest expense is antiretroviral drugs; the pills have raised Zambia’s life expectancy in the
last 15 years from 45 to 62; more than 1.6 million people here have received the free medication.

At least 1.2 million of them are still alive, living with HIV. But by the time President George W.
Bush pushed the global program through Congress in 2003, the virus had already killed millions,
leaving a demographic disaster in its wake.

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Children are raised by children in the slums of Lusaka, Zambia, where countless school-age boys and girls are
malnourished and get no classroom education; UNICEF says 800,000 kids in Zambia fit that description but
charity efforts are making a dent in the crisis

Zambia saw about 59,000 new cases of HIV transmission last year, making it 29 times as common
as in the United States and 52 times the United Kingdom’s rate. From 2016 to 2018 more Zambians
died of AIDS than Americans died fighting in the Vietnam War.

Fifty-seven succumb every day. Twenty-three are children, the main reason Zambia’s proportion of
orphans is only the world’s sixth-highest. If more survived, the largest population in the world of
children without mothers and fathers might be here. All of the top 25 countries on that list are in
Africa.

Not all orphans are wholly abandoned. UNICEF defines an orphan as ‘a child under 18 years of age
who has lost one or both parents to any cause of death.’

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Mary, a child in the Chainda slum of Lusaka, dances in jittery circles near charcoal sellers;
she is one of hundreds of thousands of orphans who live in the sub-Saharan African coun-
try’s capital city (DailyMail.com is not publishing the surnames of any children in this report)

4
Walking through the Chainda compound, the difference between children who are in
school and those who aren’t is as plain as night and day; a U.S. charity called Family
Legacy is educating 15,000 boys and girls in schools it built all over Lusaka’s poorest
neighborhoods.

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Family Legacy Chief Relationship Officer Holly Scurry (top center) is the public face of her charity’s outreach
on the ground in Lusaka, and children in the shantytowns know her as ‘Aunt Holly’

There are hundreds of thousands of ‘double orphans,’ but also ‘single orphans,’ whose remaining
parents in isolated villages often send them to the cities, alone or in groups.

There are AIDS orphans and war orphans; native orphans and those brought to Zambia by
surviving family who flee the Congo’s wars or Zimbabwe’s economic death-spiral.

Zambia, for all its Third-World-ness, is a relative oasis with a stable government. Its currency’s
value has risen more than 40-fold since a low point in 1993, when AIDS was at its most
overwhelming. It boasts the world’s second most productive copper mines. Elections, not
coups, determine its national leaders.

But the government employs three-quarters of the employed population of Lusaka, the capital
city, and regularly runs out of money to pay them. This year it will spend more than 90 per cent
of its income servicing foreign debts, even after creditors forgave billions 15 years ago.

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Video: Homeless live on the streets in Zambia’s Buseko Market slum

Asian businesses extended credit with ruinous terms. A Chinese company ceased construction
of the new air terminal when the local government defaulted on its payments. Meanwhile, other
Chinese firms build the roads and a Bank of China billboard greets every airplane that lands in
Lusaka. South Koreans start and stop the work of building bridges.

Zambia expelled an International Monetary Fund representative last year rather than face a
financial reckoning.

The rate of urbanization in this former British protectorate is the ninth-highest in the world.
The villagers come seeking nonexistent jobs and escaping illnesses that can devastate remote
areas where no one is vaccinated, and where the nearest Cipro might be eight hours away over
bumpy dirt, if you know someone with a Land Rover.

Quarantines in mud huts are usually the only defense and it’s seldom enough. Government
health agencies don’t know what kills 80 per cent of the lost. Death certificates are rare in
Lusaka and unheard of in the backcountry.

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Buying food in Lusaka’s Buseko Market ‘compound’ is a simple cash deal trading Kwacha –
money – for rice (pictured) or ‘nshima,’ a thick porridge made from finely ground corn meal;
children here might eat meat once or twice a month

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Dr. Brad Guffey is Zambia’s only pediatric infectious disease specialist and works full-time with Family Legacy;
his brightly colored ‘wellness center,’ half medical facility and half counseling rooms, opened last year and
dispenses 1,500 HIV pills every week; Guffey tells horror stories about children who come to him emaciated
and diseased, and about those he couldn’t help after rabid dogs attacked them and they were left to die in
the streets

THE LEAST, THE LAST, THE LOST

Holly Scurry is the public face of Family Legacy, a U.S. Christian organization that keeps 26
schools in Lusaka’s slums running on a shoestring. The group’s staff, almost entirely Zambian,
educate 15,000 children and house nearly 800 more in 64 purpose-built homes, half for girls
and half for boys, on 200 acres of land.

The once homeless orphans who live in those houses trade dirt for bunk beds. They learn to
cook and wash their clothes. Insistent house mothers stun them with the alien-sounding claim
that their bodies are their own, not community resources. They memorize ‘body safety rules.’

Nearly all of them suffer from complex emotional traumas. Most were physically and sexually
abused before age 13. Many live with HIV.

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Zambia is a land-locked African country whose Third-World-ness hides its status as an oasis for Congolese
fleeing war and Zimbabweans escaping economic collapse; but because AIDS condemned a generation of
adults, Zambia’s median age is under 18

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Video: Rescued Zambian orphan girls sing gospel music in Lusaka

More children than adults are thought to live in Lusaka’s Buseko Market ‘compound,’ the
preferred euphemism for shantytowns; those who can sleep under plastic tarps between
a stone wall and a sewage ditch, with homemade gangplanks the only way across

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Zambia’s teetering economy is highly dependent on foreign investment; a Bank of China billboard (left) greets
planes at Lusaka’s airport; Zambia is spending 90 per cent of its income to service foreign debts, often leaving
it unable to pay the civil servants who make up three-quarters of Lusaka’s employed workforce

‘When we first get them they don’t know

how to use a toilet. They stand on the toilets,
so we go through broken toilet seats all the
time,’ says Scurry, 37. ‘They don’t know how
to brush their teeth, so they’re literally eating
the toothpaste. They’ve never seen a fork. But
God does his best work with people who are
broken.’

Family Legacy’s seven-week ‘Camp Life’

program matches 700 Americans with 7,000
Zambian children each June and July in a
mass-triage for the young and needy.

The charity buses 1,000 children in every day for

a Vacation Bible School-like program heavy on
evangelical preaching – already the bread and
butter of a 96 per cent Christian country – but

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supplemented with danger-free play time, psychological counseling and nutritious food whose
absence has stunted their growth.

Worship services are raucous affairs, equal parts rock concert and revival tent for the least, the
last, and the lost. The kids know the songs. They dance. They sing at the top of their lungs. The
exit music is a Jock Jams mix tape.

One young African preacher booms a lesson culled from the Gospel of John, a story about Jesus
of Nazareth healing a man who was born blind.

‘The Bible is full of stories where God uses suffering for good,’ he says on a June Sunday, first in
native Nyanja and then in English.

For some of the children, their week of camp meals include more protein than they will eat the
rest of the summer. They’re placed in schools by the hundreds. The full-time homes await those
who reveal life-threatening traumas to trained counselors.

Almost no one has a father to see them off when morning buses arrive in the slums.

Family Legacy’s June-to-July ‘Camp Life’ brings nearly 1,000 Zambian children to a Vacation Bible School-
like program every week for seven weeks; Zambia is 96 per cent Christian and even the poorest kids know the
songs, but they get mentorship from American donors on a mission, and twice as many Zambian interns, plus
food and safe places to play

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‘There’s a dad problem in this country in a big
way,’ says Family Legacy CEO Mario Zandstra,
62. ‘It’s literally a nation of children raised by
children.’

Some child advocates object to the short-term

blending of impoverished children and wealthy
Americans who donate thousands of dollars
each for the chance to come to Zambia and
roll up their sleeves. The online charity world is
awash with tales of ‘voluntourism’ gone wrong,
of children who form attachments and feel
deserted a week later.

Family Legacy’s donors tend to stay involved,

Scurry says, sponsoring the children when
they go home, and funding the salaries of
community development workers, child

The children of Zambia are all ‘rescuable,’ Dr. Guffey says; thousands of Lusaka’s beautiful, tough boys and girls
are getting a chance to survive the AIDS pandemic with skills, dreams and their health intact

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Family Legacy’s ‘Tree of Life’ children’s village consists of 64 houses, half for boys and half for
girls, where the most desperate children they can identify are brought from the slums and the
streets; from the outside they could pass for suburban homes nearly anywhere in America

VIDEO: English actress Chelsee Healey visited with Zambian children for an episode of the
television program ‘Comic Relief’ in 2013

15
The kids get bunk beds, mosquito nets, wardrobes, three meals a day and live-in house mothers; Dr. Guffey’s
medical clinic is minutes away

protection officers and staff whose job is to oversee character development. Many come back.
Some pay for the construction of entire new houses.

Camp Life is the table ante.

American and European groups that work on the ground in sub-Saharan Africa are acutely
aware of suspicions that they might see themselves as ‘white saviors,’ driving the more effective
charities to flood the zone with every qualified native employee they can find.

‘Short-term mission experiences should always be paired with longer-term, more sustainable
initiatives,’ Katie McGinnis tells me. She is Family Legacy’s psychosocial services director and
boasts that her dedicated child protection and counseling teams are ‘made up entirely of
Zambian nationals.’

She says the organization works ‘to equip local Zambians with specialized knowledge, training,
and skills so that they can provide holistic care for all of the children in our programs year-round.’

Those locals include Country Director in charge of Country Operations Sam Musyoki, a Kenyan
national who is responsible for Family Legacy’s day-to-day operations inside Zambia. He is a 12-
year veteran of the better-known Plan International humanitarian charity.
16
HEALING AFTER ‘FERAL LIVING’

The first day of each week of summer camp

begins with a medical check-in for nearly a
thousand kids, a quarter-mile-long line of
seizures, bloody urine, HIV, open wounds,
maggots and lice.

Dr. Guffey, 44, works here with a team who

deworm every child. Some arrive with scars
from witchcraft ‘healing’ rituals.

‘We have kids that have grown up in dog

cages, and kids who have grown up on the
streets. In chicken coops,’ he says. ‘When you
talk about a child-raised home, that’s pretty
close to feral living.’

Others climb into a branch high up on

their family trees where their grandparents
are, because AIDS, cholera, malaria and
tuberculosis have chopped off all the lower Katie McGinnis, Family Legacy’s director of psycho-
limbs. social services, says her organization uses its mission
‘camp’ as a point of entry to broad social services
‘Mom and dad are gone,’ Guffey says.’ The including schooling, medical attention and counseling
supported by a native Zambian staff of more than 1,000
problem is the aunts and uncles are dead too.
That is what we see over and over. Nine kids in
the grandmother’s house. The community has collapsed.’

The lack of medical care leaves its own scars on the smallest ones, preschool-age and younger,
who deteriorate with Victorian-era ailments from sheer neglect.

Some don’t eat unless they’re lucky enough to steal a staple food they know how to cook. Worse
horrors await others.

‘We’ve seen children admitted with golf ball-size tuberculomas in their brains,’ Guffey says. ‘Like
five years old, 15 pounds, never walked, never talked. Never, ever went to a clinic.’

‘I’ve seen rabies. I’ve seen one dog kill 11 kids. One dog. Eleven kids died.’

His ‘definition of hell’ is a scene he recounts from a compound near Lusaka’s commercial district
known as a well-armed narcotics trafficking haven, a place where police fear to tread.

‘Chibolya,’ Guffey says, naming the slum. ‘Side of the road, in the gutter, a woman passed out
drunk in a drainage ditch, her baby trying to open her blouse to drink.’

Guffey lives among the 64 orphans’ homes, overseeing a cheerfully muraled clinic on the
property that dispenses 1,500 HIV pills every week.

17
Schooling at a ‘Legacy Academy’ is a half-day affair, the same as government-run schools,
but classroom sizes are about 25 instead of 70, everyone gets lunch and no one pays tuition;
American donors pick up the tab

A Zambian government official who requested anonymity said Family legacy is the most
ambitious charity of its kind working in sub-Saharan Africa, but ‘the books and lessons and
houses and medical care and the 4 million meals they give the children this year will not be
enough’ to save an entire generation of children

18
The quadruple board-certified doctor left a medical school professorship at the University
of Alabama at Birmingham to work in Africa. His team opened the clinic last November, fully
accredited, six months after sketching it out on a napkin. Dallas-based donors picked up the tab.

TEACH, DON’T ADOPT

‘We’re Texans,’ one oil-wealthy contributor tells me. ‘We do stuff big.’ More than half of Family
Legacy’s 10,000 donor families are from the Lone Star State, a product of its Dallas roots.

Their biggest impact might not be food and clothing, but classroom time.

The schools, branded ‘Legacy Academies,’ serve as first lines of defense for the most vulnerable
children Zandstra’s social-service team can identify.

Children International, WorldVision and assorted other groups solicit sponsorships for children
and operate community programs here. But a government official says Family Legacy is
overseeing the most ambitious private expansion of schooling in sub-Saharan Africa.

These teenagers, among Family Legacy’s residents in the children’s village, explained that because tribal
culture carries over into city life, girls on their periods are often forced to sleep outside – away from family
members, on the ground – because they are considered ‘unclean’

19
VIDEO: Former first couple George W. Bush and Laura Bush visited an orphanage in Zambia in 2012

The official requests anonymity, however, before admitting that ‘the books and lessons and
houses and medical care and the 4 million meals they give the children this year will not be
enough.’

Zandstra sees his enrollment growing. ‘Five years ago we had 3,000 kids. Now we have 15,000,’
he says. But those who can’t physically or safely walk to school are still on the outside looking in.

‘If the statistics are right, we’re only caring for 10 per cent of the uneducated population that’s
vulnerable in the city,’ he says.

The ones they reach get free uniforms, lunches and classroom time with a 25-to-1 ratio of
students to teachers. Government schools operate at 70-to-1 and charge tuition after primary
school.

Zambian Department of Social Welfare official Sandra Mhango says she ‘couldn’t safely say’ how
many children are going without any schooling at all.

20
Mario Zandstra (right) runs the charity and says that despite its ambitious scale his schooling program is reach-
ing only about 10 per cent of the kids in Lusaka who need it (Courtesy of Family Legacy)

UNICEF reports that 800,000 school-age children in Zambia are in that group. Of those who get
an education, more than half fail to finish the equivalent of the seventh grade.

Still, the government here frowns on the idea of foreign adoptions, and discussion of Westerners
rescuing even the youngest and poorest children is met with stern resistance.

‘The child who is in Zambia needs to stay with those people here,’ Mhango says, allowing no
wiggle room for children who wander Lusaka’s charitably named ‘compounds,’ its perpetually
decaying slums.

Asked how many homeless orphans might be in Lusaka, she has no answer.

Zambian law requires foreigners to relocate to Zambia for at least three months and foster
children inside the country before leaving with them. In some cases red-tape delays have pushed
that to 12 or even 18 months. It’s an unwieldy obligation for willing American parents that Mhango
brushes off as unimportant.

21
A majority of children who come to Family Legacy’s resident program have been sexually
abused; many are surprised to learn that their bodies aren’t community or family resources,
so house mothers drill a set of ‘body safety rules’ into the kids

22
‘People from outside the country are free to come and adopt,’ she says with a nod, but only after
‘they get used to the child.’

Preventing the First World from scooping up the young, a national obsession, is driven largely
by concerns about an adoption-driven generational brain drain and fears that the children may
be later discarded.

When the Republic of Zambia delivered its Instruments of Independence to British governors in
1964, the newborn country – previously a protectorate called Northern Rhodesia – had just two
medical doctors and about 1,000 high school graduates. Fewer than 100 of them held university
degrees.

‘These kids are going to grow up and be the leaders of their nation,’ a determined Scurry says of
her charges. ‘I cannot wait to see 10 years from now, 20 years from now, who they will become.’

‘I truly believe we will have a wide spectrum of children,’ she continues, including blue
collar tradesmen ‘but also children who have become the teachers, who have become the
accountants, who have become the nurses and, Lord willing, who have become the doctors.’

Zambian Department of Social Welfare official Sandra Mhango says she ‘couldn’t safely say’ how many children
are going without any schooling at all; she insists that it’s not too burdensome for Westerners to move to Zambia
for three months or more and foster a child before adopting

23
Lusaka’s compounds are bursting at the seams with HIV-positive children, many of whom were born with the
virus; one in 13 children in Zambia will die before age five

24
A map published in the journal Nature this year shows the extent of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa in dramatic
detail; the purple areas, with the highest rates of infection, include Botswana, Zimbabwe, portions of South
Africa and about half of Zambia

25
There are redemption stories here among Zambian orphans who are safe now, or whose
unimaginable childhoods are mercifully over.

There are girls who know the pain of sexual abuse and have survived knife attacks. Boys who
attempted suicide by refusing to take their AIDS medication. Children burned in fires but still
alive enough to sing.

They’re beautiful and tough, and they’re like us. They sing in the shower. They love getting lost
in mystery novels. They want to see an ocean someday. A few have jobs and cellphones and
Snapchat and WhatsApp.

They have stories to tell.

‘LAND OF A MILLION ORPHANS’ IS A 3-PART SERIES; READ PART 1 AND PART 3

You can learn more about humanitarian crises in Zambia from UNICEF, UNAIDS, the PEPFAR
program or Family Legacy.

Kids are kids in Lusaka; girls with nothing but the clothes on their back, and no parents to go home to, play on
unpaved streets among endless stacks of charcoal – and don’t know how poor they are

26
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7229475/

LAND OF A MILLION ORPHANS: Zambia’s forgotten children

tell their stories of beatings, sexual assaults, suicide attempts
and life-long HIV as DailyMail.com tracks their hope and
survival
• PART 3 OF AN EXCLUSIVE 3-PART SERIES; READ PART 1 AND PART 2
• Zambia is a land-locked nation in sub-Saharan Africa whose population of 17 million includes 1 million
orphans; AIDS killed an entire generation of parents, aunts, uncles and other adults
• The result is a country where half the population is younger than 18; DailyMail.com traveled there to meet
children in two slums in the capital city
• They pointed out where they used to sleep, talked about living with HIV since birth, sang, cried and planned
• Hundreds of thousands of children in Lusaka sleep in overcrowded one-room shacks or under plastic tarps;
one in 13 Zambians will die before age 5, and many kids don’t know their parents or their own birthdays
• Zambia discourages westerners from adopting, preferring to keep children in the country rather than risk a
brain-drain; potential adopters must move there to foster a child first
• Charities like Family Legacy hope to turn orphans into doctors and accountants in a country where just one-
third of people have electricity and basic sanitation
• You can learn more about humanitarian crises in Zambia from UNICEF, UNAIDS, the PEPFAR program or
Family Legacy

By DAVID MARTOSKO FOR DAILYMAIL.COM IN LUSAKA, ZAMBIA

PUBLISHED: 11 July 2019
With photography by DAVID MARTOSKO FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

The slight Zambian woman in a brick red A-line dress takes me down an alleyway in one of
Lusaka’s more dismal slums and makes a turn, stopping at the empty shell of a makeshift shack.
The crude framework of uneven wooden posts, two-by-fours and tin sheeting blends in with
hundreds of others.

A collapsed plastic tarp, providing no shelter at all, lies crumpled beneath it.

‘I was here,’ says Shalom. ‘This is where I would sleep.’

The 20-year-old points to a pile of dried grass in front of the coarse shack – makeshift bedding
that an errant charcoal cooking fire has mostly reduced to black powder. She smiles for a photo.

Shalom came to Family Legacy’s attention as a 10-year-old orphan. The Texas-based charity’s
social service workers spotted her in the Buseko Market slum and took her in. Some children
there, she says, still ‘sleep in drainages.’

1
Shalom, 20, shows the place in the Buseko Market compound of Lusaka, Zambia where she slept until she was
10 years old; native social-service staff of the Family Legacy charity took her in and gave her a safe place to
grow up; she never knew her father and her mother lives in a distant village; she yearns to be a pediatrician

Her mother had sent her and her two sisters to Lusaka and stayed behind in a village about 260
miles to the west, roughly the distance between Washington and Pittsburgh. She hasn’t gone
back in years.

‘I don’t remember my biological father’s face,’ Shalom says. ‘Not at all. He died when I was about
three or four years old. I was too young, and no one even has a picture of him.’

When a Zambian orphan says her father passed away more than a dozen years ago, no one asks
how he died.

Like most of sub-Saharan Africa, the land-locked nation lost a generation of men and women to
AIDS. Shalom and a million others soldiered on without one or both parents.

Her sisters have seven children between them, and she lives with them all in a Lusaka
neighborhood which, while poor, is an upgrade from where she started.

Children of her own are not in Shalom’s plans. This luminous, rebuilt orphan is trying to get into
medical school.

2
More than 1 million children in Zambia are growing up without parents, largely due to an AIDS pandemic that
claimed countless fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles and other extended family members; today’s generation of
Zambian young people can often be seen on the streets of Lusaka’s slums, children being raised by children

‘I want to be a pedia–, a pediatrical–, you know, a doctor for children,’ she laughs, unable to spit
the word out in English.

Shalom hopes to enroll at Cavendish University in Lusaka, which offers medical training.

She and Holly Scurry, Family Legacy’s chief relationship officer, walk the market slum’s dusty
alleys with me just before sunset and buy yellow bags of rice and corn mealy-meal, the makings
of a stick-to-your-ribs breakfast porridge. A bit of cash buys a bucketful out of a larger bucket.

They divide it into smaller bags and give them to families they know. For some it’s the only meal
of the day.

Zambia, a mother of six named Fatima told me in another shantytown days earlier, ‘sometimes
runs out of food, but we never run out of children.’ She also cared for her late sister’s three
children.

Zambia needs to turn that boundless crop of orphans into farmers, doctors, lawyers, financial
gurus and tradesmen and women, Scurry says. Adopting them out across an ocean ‘doesn’t get
the big picture.’
3
The area where Shalom grew up is called Buseko Market; people live between a stone wall and a sewage ditch,
sleeping on fanned-out bales of dried grass and hauling water from a communal well; there is no electricity or
public sanitation

EMMA, BUPE AND ESTHER

Emma, 21, sees herself in the same light.

‘We want to change our nation. If most Zambian children were adopted Zambia wouldn’t
develop at all,’ she explains. Family Legacy found her at age 11 in the Kamanga ‘compound,’ a
gentler word for slum. Her younger sisters Bupe and Esther would follow.

Emma’s life nearly ended at the hands of her mother, an alcoholic, single-parenting AIDS widow
who flew into a rage one night after a fire consumed everything in their shanty. She blamed
the girl, then nine years old, for knocking over a charcoal brazier that was their only night-time
source of light and heat.

Emma ran into the flames to rescue her infant sister, knowing without looking that her mother
was too drunk. Baby Esther survived but was so badly burned that only now, 12 years later, is her
hair growing back in more than patches.

‘My biological mother would drink a lot. She would beat me,’ Emma says. ‘If anything at home
went missing, I would be the one to blame. She beat me so hard.’

4
She remembers a day in her tween years when she misheard what her mother sent her to buy at
an open-air market, coming back with eggs instead of oranges. The eggs broke.

‘My mom was so upset she threw a knife at me. It hit me somewhere in the head,’ she recalls.
‘She would hit me with a metal stick. She would hit me with whatever she had.’

And then, as matter-of-fact as shopping, she drops a bomb: ‘My step-uncle tried to rape me.’

Family Legacy shares before-and-after photos of Catherine at age three (left) and age eight today (right); Cath-
erine was born to a teenage prostitute in Buseko Market; she and her sister Beatrice, then seven years old, were
sleeping in roadside trash piles on the side of a road where trucks passed regularly, according to the organiza-
tion’s chief relationship officer Holly Scurry (Courtesy of Family Legacy)

5
Scurry walked with Shalom through the streets and alleys of Buseko Market like an
expert tour guide; she has been there hundreds of times, keeping tabs on boys and
girls who attend one of her organization's 26 tuition-free schools nearby

6
Emma, now 21, tells a story of how her alcoholic and abusive mother once threw a knife at her and hit her in the
head for a minor offense; her step-uncle later tried to rape her; she is a success story and credits Family Legacy
with saving her and her two sisters
Emma once raced into a fire to save her then-infant
sister Esther (pictured at age 4), who emerged burned
but alive; her mother blamed Emma for the fire and
beat her (Courtesy of Family Legacy)
7
Her mother didn’t believe her. She sided
with the man in order to keep the peace with
her then-latest husband, his brother. Today
she sells vegetables and has another son,
Emmanuel, who is three. Emma thinks her
mother may be pregnant again.
Bupe, the 15-year-old middle sister, is living at
Family Legacy’s ‘Tree of Life’ children’s village
with Esther. Emma says Bupe ‘will literally cry
the whole day’ over small slights.
The girl who inhales Nancy Drew mysteries
keeps details of her traumatic past to herself,
but weeps quietly about how ‘life would
be bad’ if she still lived in the compounds
because ‘I would not be going to school.’
Bupe has dazzling science grades. Doctors in
Zambia can make a lot of money, she muses
softly. A moment later she and her sunny eyes
are simply 15 again. Bupe likes to eat rice and
sausage. She pines for a pair of skinny jeans.
Her chuckle is infectious.
Today Esther, 12 (right), and middle sister Bupe, 15 (left), live in the children’s village from which Emma has
moved on to university; Bupe alternates between softly crying and a run of joyful teen-speak about how much
she wants a pair of ‘skinny jeans’

THE SHY, THE SUICIDAL AND THE FUTURE

Other children in the orphans’ village, Zambia’s rescued future, hide their suffering behind
photogenic masks.

Joyce, flyweight at 18, strikes runway-model poses and giggles a universal teen-speak that hides
a subject she will only describe as ‘a very difficult situation’ – words whose overtones carry
gravity. Eyes downcast, neck drooped, lips pursed, she suddenly runs silent.

‘You can’t know what I’m feeling if you’re not close to me,’ she says. ‘See, I’m a talk, talk, talk
person. And I like to sing. Church songs. But I’m shy.’

At first thready and then reedy, and finally in full brass, Joyce sings a worship song made
popular by the Nigerian gospel singer Mercy Chinwo.

‘Jesus you love me too much,’ she sings. ‘All your promises are “Yeah” and “Amen”.’

‘You’re not a man. You never lie.’

8
Fifty-seven Zambians die of AIDS-related illnesses every day. Twenty-three are children; asked where his
mother and father are, this boy (left) in Lusaka’s Chainda compound said, ‘I do not see them now’

For some in Lusaka the will to live is the success story.

Dalitso, 20, once stopped taking his HIV medication, praying he would die like his mother. She
passed when he was five years old, and his father died seven years later.

The virus, his only birthright, left his immune system powerless to fend off an infection that
attacked his spinal cord. He walked on his knees, moving one leg and then the other with his
hands like a marionette.

‘When I was eating I used to vomit. My legs were paralyzed,’ he remembers. ‘I developed the
sores in my mouth, and no one knew how to treat those.’

9
Dalitso was growth-stunted and AIDS-ravaged (left, courtesy of Family Legacy) by the time he first received an-
tiretroviral drugs; although they held his HIV in check, the virus had damaged his spinal cord to the point where
he later lost the use of his legs; he stopped taking the medicine at one point in the hope that he would die, but
today he’s a healthy 20-year-old (right)

That was six years ago. When Dalitso goes back to the compounds to visit a distant uncle, he
doesn’t talk about it.

‘In Zambia when you have got HIV, it’s hard to share with people,’ he explains. ‘It will go around.
They don’t keep secrets and then you find some who commit suicide. But it’s like, it’s just fine.
When you understand it, it’s fine.’

Dalitso walks now, but low to the ground like many his age. Forty per cent of Zambian children
are height-stunted by age five.

Relentless disease and malnutrition kept his bones short. A long-awaited teenage growth spurt
never came, leaving him just under 5 feet tall.

Dalitso is a born tinkerer and can fix almost anything. He has long wanted to captain a ship, but
has never seen an ocean.

Becoming a psychologist instead, he says, might help him short-circuit the next round of
national hopelessness.

10
Two girls at the ‘Tree of Life’ children’s village, a group of 64 purpose-built homes where Lusaka’s most
desperate orphans can live in safety, are pictured washing their clothes outside the house they share with
ten other girls and a pair of house-mothers who alternate shifts

‘I changed my career,’ he announces. ‘Right now I want to

do counseling. I can be the captain of a ship. I can achieve
what I want, but my heart is for this.’

‘I like sharing and talking to young people, those who are

lame, those who can’t do anything.’

‘I’M COMPLETELY HEALED’

The trajectory of a child’s life in the United States can

seem bleak to those at the bottom of the scale. Walk-in
emergency rooms, welfare payments and underfunded
public schools grant a too-slow ascent to the middle class,
but the lifelines are free, even for those without papers.

Thousands of miles to the east, health is a luxury. Dinner is

often what you can steal. Books are precious and teachers Joyce, rescued from one of Lusaka’s
are few. more fearsome shantytowns, wears
a smile that hides a secret trauma,
something she won’t speak of but
which drives her to silence when
she thinks of it
11
Richard, an avid chess player who never owned a chessboard, now has his first set (the pieces are
inside); he wants to become Zambia’s finance minister, and then his country’s president; The country’s
only pediatric infectious disease specialist, an American from Alabama, saved the orphaned boy from
likely death when a painful and stubborn bacterial infection ate through the tibia bone in his right leg

12
Richard, the boy whose oozing wound once shed a piece of his leg bone into a surgeon’s hand,
is a success story. He’s headed to college.

‘I think I’m completely healed,’ he says. ‘I suffered a lot.’

Scars and silence aside, Richard could be any middle-class American teen. He’s not sure he
wants to date but knows a few girls who would like him to decide.

Children in Lusaka play chess the way they play checkers, with two different colors of caps
from water bottles and lines inked on cardboard or scratched in the dirt. Letters in black magic
marker identify the pieces.

‘I’m one of the best,’ Richard says, a rare boast, although he has never faced a seasoned
opponent.

I bought him a chess set from a craftsman. It cost 200 Kwacha, about $16.

Richard passed the national exams given after 7th and 9th grades. He plans to enroll in a
university with financial help from the American sponsors who have tracked his progress from
agony to victory. He dreams of becoming an economist.

Not so he can rake in the Kwacha, he insists. For Zambia.

‘I want to work as finance minister,’ Richard says, ‘so that I can become president.’

‘LAND OF A MILLION ORPHANS’ IS A 3-PART SERIES; READ PART 1 AND PART 2

You can learn more about humanitarian crises in Zambia from UNICEF, UNAIDS, the PEPFAR
program or Family Legacy.

Poor children in Zambia typi-

cally play chess and checkers
with two colors of water-bottle
caps and hand-drawn grids

13
14