Hunger Haunts Cameroon Schoolgirl

By Lane Hartill

You wouldn't know it by watching Beatrice tease the boys at school or waltz to class. You couldn't tell by how hard she works at home. There's no way, in fact, you would know that this slight 13-year-old, who can lift a 50-pound jug full of scummy pond water, hasn't eaten in the last 24 hours.

There was no breakfast. And the small plastic baggie of flavored ice she sucked at noon wasn't really lunch.

Now it's pushing 4 o'clock and Beatrice is sitting in a shed smoked black by a cooking fire. She's waiting for her mom to dish up a wad of couscous, cassava dough and a piece of fish the size of a bathtub plug. This is all she will eat until tomorrow, when she will have the same thing.

After dinner, which she shares with her brother, Fernandez, Beatrice goes next door and borrows a protractor from a neighbor. She sits in her family's mud house, opens her geometry homework and starts in by the lantern. The city cut off their electricity a month ago because her father couldn't pay the bill.

When her homework is done and 9 p.m. rolls around and the hymns from the church nearby quiet down, she'll go to sleep on a mat on the dirt floor. Her two brothers, Dylan and Fernandez, and Alvine, her little sister, will pack themselves into a bed without a mattress. They will sleep on wooden slats in a dank room that smells of mildew and earth.

Everyone hopes it won't rain because the holes that send lasers of light through the thatch roof in the living room turn into funnels that pour water down on Beatrice. If it does rain, she'll collect her mat, find a dry place in the corner, and wait it out. When the rain stops, she'll try to get some sleep before sunrise and the 1¼-mile walk to school.

An Incomplete Knowledge

Beatrice knows a lot of things. She knows her life hasn't been easy. But she says with a smile that she's used to it, that eating once a day has become normal. She also knows that three times a year, Catholic Relief Services and the Catholic Church will give her and her siblings a sack of food containing such staples as rice, oil and sugar. The organizations also pay school fees and offer counseling.

But there's one thing she doesn't know: Her parents are HIV-positive. Her father says she's too young to understand. He'll tell her. Just not yet.

When her father fell sick, Beatrice's mom was gone for several days at a time while her husband visited a traditional healer. During this time Beatrice, 9 years old then, was the woman of the house. She didn't go to school. She cooked for another sibling, Martinique, and bathed Alvine and Dylan. She held Fernandez, whose eyes are clouded with cataracts.

For almost a year, when Beatrice's mom was pregnant with Aristide—who now seems to always be nursing—and HIV-positive herself, she somehow managed to help care for her husband while he was bedridden.

The time Beatrice's mom has put in shows. By the end of the day, she is wilting, her body slack, her smiles wan. Neither she nor her husband is on antiretroviral treatment (though her husband has started the process). Their only income is the $6 a month she makes selling cassava in the market, which isn't enough to feed, clothe and care for six children and a sick husband and herself.

"They were much worse off," says Benoit Ngonsi, who heads a CRS-supported project that helps orphans and vulnerable children in the Batouri diocese. Now CRS and the Catholic Church have helped pay for Fernandez's eye consultation. They even paid for a new pair of sandals for Beatrice. Without this help, it's unlikely Beatrice would be in school.

CRS also helped obtain birth certificates for Beatrice and the other children. If parents don't do this within a month of birth, it turns into a snarl of bureaucracy. Without a birth certificate, Beatrice couldn't get a national identity card. Without an identity card, you can be thrown in jail.

Benoit says that the while the family's situation has had a psychological impact on Beatrice, she has been fortunate. Unlike many children, her parents are alive. She also hasn't yet reached puberty, when many girls are forced into selling themselves to make ends meet.

Stigma and Superstition

In Cameroon's eastern region, where Beatrice lives, there are 8,000 orphans and vulnerable children. By 2025, says Dr. Leslie Chingang, a medical doctor who helps manage a CRS program in the Catholic Diocese of Batouri, up to 10 percent of the country's population will be HIV orphans. CRS and the diocese are helping the 500 most serious cases in the eastern region.

"Sometimes you go into the schools and the teachers will tell me the child is split between head of household" and being a student, says Benoit. "That interrupts their schooling. Even if there are actions taken and we bring help but the child is the head of household, there's an impact with regard to school."

Dr. Chingang says that some children also suffer abuse because of fears about HIV and AIDS.

"Many people in this part of the country still associate HIV/AIDS with witchcraft and supernatural forces," says Dr. Chingang. "This explains why orphans are often rejected by their relatives, who accuse them [of] being in possession of the same witchcraft that killed their parents. Some families, even after taking up the orphan, mistreat the child with the pretext that he or she is possessed."

Teachers say that Beatrice is calm but an average student. She's not very dynamic in class. She goes to Sambo Junior High School, where there are 11 other orphans and vulnerable children. They know each other, and talk at recess. But the other students don't know what they go through at home.

After school one day, they gathered to tell their stories. A girl in a white satiny shirt read a letter she had written.

"As you can see, among us there are orphans abandoned by their family. And some of us have had all the household responsibility fall on us while we haven't yet reached motherhood, not to mention the lashes that we suffer if we commit the slightest mistake, the insults also. We put up with this abuse because we don't have any other choice.

"For some of us, giving ourselves over to death is one solution that swirls in our little hearts. For all of this, some girls among us see ourselves obligated to go out with boys in the search of money.

"We praise the good Lord to bless…you who are making an effort to make financial, material and moral donations. We can't give you back this charity; only God will give it back to you."

When she finished, the applause echoed through the neighborhood.

Lane Hartill is the West Africa regional information officer for Catholic Relief Services. He is based in Dakar, Senegal.