REMEMBER Sophie’s Choice? It was the heart-rending Meryl Streep movie set in WW2 where a mother had to choose which of her children to save amid the horror of the Nazi concentration camps. Sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, it’s a joy to think that this horrific choice doesn’t face mothers any more. And yet it still does, in another way.

Put yourself in the place of a young mother in Mozambique, an East African country where HIV/AIDS has spread so that one in every seven people are now infected with the virus. This young mum is HIV-positive and knows she could give her beloved baby the virus through breast milk. Feeding her baby formula would be the sensible choice. Except that she lives in a rural part of Mozambique, where only a third of the population have access to uncontaminated water. If she can get formula – almost impossible given the poverty - feeding her baby with formula made of contaminated water can be just as fatal.

In this part of the world, diarrhoea kills. There’s no real health system, no social welfare and only 400 doctors for a population of 18.6million people. Thanks to UNICEF’s programme for preventing HIV transmission from mothers to their babies, hundreds of thousands of women in Mozambique are being helped to avoid transmitting the virus during pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding with the help of modern arti-retroviral drugs. Yet in the most remote areas, where there’s such a problem with water contamination, breastfeeding is the only choice.
It’s Sophie’s Choice for the modern world.

I’ve just come back from Mozambique with UNICEF Ireland and I can honestly say that the trip changed my life. My brief is to work as one of two Irish UNICEF Ambassadors for the Global Parenting campaign – the celebrated actor Stephen Rea is the other - which aims to help some of the world’s 14 million children orphaned by AIDS.

UNICEF’s aim is summed up in their motto: For Every Child Health, Education, Equality, Protection. That involves many different projects from the vital mother-to-baby-prevention programme, to malaria programmes (malaria is the biggest child killer in Mozambique, like in many African countries). But the tragedy of the AIDS orphans is one of the most urgent programmes there is.

Because AIDS orphans are kids like ours, laughing seven-year-olds, serious eleven-year-olds, with no mums or dads and no hope for the future unless people like UNICEF keep working on their behalf. I took pages and pages of notes on my trip, yet it’s taken me longer to write this than any other article I’ve ever written, because I’ve never written anything as important. Because if I can do this properly, it will touch you too and you can help.

For me, being a mother is the most important part of my life. In Mozambique, I met mothers who face problems that I daren’t imagine. HIV-positive mothers desperately trying to get their beloved HIV-positive kids on the life-saving anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) that can mean the difference between life and death.

In the remote Xai Xai province on the third day of my visit, a woman sits on a chair in the Day Hospital with her fragile seven-year-old daughter in front of her.

The little girl is beautifully dressed in a white broderie anglaise blouse, almost like a party dress. Yet there is no party in her life. She was diagnosed with HIV six months ago. Her mother is HIV-positive too. The little girl holds onto her stomach nervously, while her mother clutches her handbag tightly. Neither of them is on ARVs yet.

These expensive drugs are still not widely available and the day hospital director, the calm and caring Dr Guillermo, is one of the people who must make the decision whether the mum and daughter get them. It’s a complex decision based on factors like blood count and whether the mother and daughter will be able to take the drugs correctly for the rest of their lives. During the trip, myself and the team meet lots of smiling people who thank UNICEF for their various projects (this hospital is funded by UNICEF at a cost of $200,000 a year), and in pidgin Portuguese, we reply. With this sad-eyed woman, there’s nothing any of us can say. There is nothing to say.

In Mozambique, 270,000 children are orphans because of AIDS. They care for their dying parents and then they have to care for their brothers and sisters, as well as trying to protect their tiny families and feed them. Like handsome young Andreas who was just thirteen when his mum and dad died. Andreas is now eighteen, the head of his household, mum and dad to his four siblings. When his parents died, the youngest were four-year-old twins. As a mother of 20-month-old twins, I can’t imagine how a thirteen year-old would cope with being a parent. But Andreas, standing tall and proud beside the cane-house he built for his family, says: ‘We get on all right. We all help. Our neighbour helps us. Kuvumbana help us.’

Kuvumbana, which means Unity in the local language, is a UNICEF-funded voluntary group of people living with HIV/AIDS who support children orphaned due to the disease. Orphans in the West have social services and extended families to take care of them. In Mozambique, the adult population is being eroded due to AIDS slowly, so the extended families are often elderly grandparents. There’s little legal framework in place so kids don’t even have a system to get lost in. They drop out of school, are vulnerable to abuse and child labour. Not alone have they watched their parents die, but they’ve got to grow up instantly.

As a mother of two young sons, the trip was a combination of heartbreaking and shocking. Every day, amid great poverty, I met smiling children with shining dark eyes who deserve just as wonderful a future as my kids. But because HIV has ravaged their country, they face an uncertain future.

We’ve got so much. It’s up to us to give them a future.

Also check out Cathy's diary of the trip to Mozambique on the Unicef Website

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