Alumbwe, who's 12 and lives in Zambia, gets ready for school.It's a 2 mile walk from his home.
He and his brothers have lived without adult supervision since their parents died of AIDS earlier this year.Andy Higgins for NPR hide caption Whenever it rains, Joseph, Gift and Alumbwe — ages 17, 15 and 12 — scramble to move their clothes to a dry corner of their home, deep in the Copperbelt Province of Zambia.
That's because rain streams through holes in the roof."The house is not okay.Even though we live here it's only because we have nowhere else to go," says Joseph, speaking in the local language Bemba.
"When it starts raining, where we sleep becomes wet."For stories about life in our changing world, subscribe to NPR's Global Health newsletter.They don't have to move their mattresses, he explains, because they don't have any — the boys sold them when they needed money.Instead, they sleep on a bamboo mat on the floor and share a blanket.Their mother died in January, their father in February.
Now these brothers are in the process of figuring out the basics of living alone.NPR is not using the brothers' last name because they are minors.Both parents were HIV positive but had been able to survive because of the daily medications they took to prevent the virus from progressing.When the U.S.
overhauled foreign aid at the start of President Trump's second term, there were major cuts to global health — and disruptions to the U.S.'s flagship efforts to combat HIV/AIDS globally called PEPFAR or the U.S.President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.The boys say that, in the overhaul, their parents could no longer get their HIV medications as the program that delivered medication to their remote area suddenly stopped.
It took just about a year for both parents to succumb to the virus.The phenomenon of child-headed households and orphans was a de...