Madonna can help Zambia's Aids crisis

An overnight flight to Zambia. Haven’t been here in 20 years.

Bigger, but still verdant green boulevards into town. Early morning bicycles laden with vast bags of charcoal struggle along the dust tracks at the roadside.

I’m here for a conference, of which more in the next blog.

I take advantage of the early start in the day to visit My Father’s House, an orphanage. A friend of mine raises funds for them in the UK. My guide is Ann, British-born but who’s lived in Lusaka for 44 years.

There are seven houses in which a “mother” looks after a family of eight or nine children. These are Aids orphans. They range in age from four to 16, of both sexes. There’s a wonderful atmosphere in the place – clean as a new pin, and spirited children.

It’s the mother who intrigues me. She’s perhaps in her fifties. Naively, I ask if she has any of her own children. “All but one dead,” she says, “Aids and malaria took them.” Yet somehow she has made this transfer from her biological and maternal loss to these random parentless children and embraces them as her own. And the story is the same all across the project.

Then to a far bigger orphanage run by nuns of Mother Teresa’s order. This proves one of the emotionally challenging sights I have ever seen. Rows and rows and rows of cots of babies whose mothers are already dead of Aids. There are also several whose mums died giving birth to them.

The babies long to be hugged. You pick them up at your peril. Each time I did, the child cried to be kept close. You could not put her down.

I am here the day Madonna lost her court case trying to adopt another child from Malawi. Come here, Madonna: this country needs you. Here are perhaps 80 orphaned babies and infants under four – some estimates say 20 per cent of Zambians have Aids.

I felt utterly powerless. Powerless to intervene, powerless to provide the father or mother they craved. Some will stay here to their teens. Africa’s Aids crisis continues.