KAREN, Kenya - A dozen years ago Sr. Mary Owens buried three children a month — many of them she had helped raise from babyhood to four, five and six years old.

“It was very, very demanding” is as much as the stoic Irish missionary will say about it.

But when she visits the graveyard with a gang of kids five to 12 years old, it’s a struggle for her to keep her professionally cheery, child psychologist front up. The kids make a game of running from cross to cross in their orphanage’s cemetery asking about each of the children buried there. Owens patiently answers their questions.
 

“Yes, she was a big girl... He was a good boy; very young...”

The cemetery is no longer used for new burials. A few years ago the city government told the missionary run orphanage it couldn’t operate a graveyard without a licence. But in the mid-1990s everyone was quite happy to see the orphanage quietly taking care of its own.

The name of the orphanage is Nyumbani — Kiswahili for home. It was started in 1991 when American Jesuit missionary Fr. Frank D’Agostino was serving on the board of another orphanage. The orphanage was asked whether it would take in an abandoned, HIV-positive child. The board said it had no medical infrastructure to care for such a child. But the doctor and psychiatrist D’Agostino said he would start an orphanage that would be up to the challenge.

For D’Agostino and Owens it was all about valuing each young life, even knowing they wouldn’t make it much past five or six.

“We were actually told by one donor, ‘Look, the focus is on prevention. Condoms. The children are going to die. We have to have priorities,’ ” recalled Owens. “At that time we were moving to palliative care.”

The idea that children were collateral damage, or a distraction, in the fight against AIDS angered Owens and D’Agostino.

“The whole value of the human person was at stake,” Owens said.

It’s still at stake, but antiretrovirals (ARVs) have changed the landscape. The children running around in the Nyumbani cemetery shouting questions at Owens are mostly older than the ones buried beneath the crosses. And they will grow up.

The oldest of Nyumbani’s children is now 24 and finishing high school. Nyumbani staff are  hoping to get him into some sort of post-secondary training for a trade. There are more than 35 teenagers among the 95 children at the orphanage. New buildings are going up to house the adolescents. Right now the little bungalows where children sleep, eat, study and play are bursting with 16 to 18 kids in each one, ranging in age from preschoolers to those planning university careers.

Owens says the adolescent houses should be ready before Christmas. Then the numbers should shrink back down to something resembling a traditional African family of 10 to 12 children per house.

But building houses is easy. Preparing young people for life with HIV is something completely new.

“We’re going to have to, I believe, be in the forefront as to how these young people can live a normal sexual life — without, of course, transmitting the virus,” said the sister.

The suggestion that Nyumbani children should somehow live in exile from sexual life makes Owens angry. She wants to attend their weddings, and perhaps hold their babies.

“They come to us and say, ‘These children are carrying the virus, and you have to be very careful they don’t act out.’ Their concern is about their children or others in society — not about these children,” she said. “But they (Nyumbani’s HIV-positive teenagers) are human beings with a sexual potential.”

The children themselves know their HIV status, and have been educated about every detail of the disease. Their classmates in school know they come from the HIV-positive orphanage, and the children grow up learning to challenge the stigma attached to the disease.

Marriage for the HIV positive won’t be easy, but Owens believes a Christian vision that invites everyone to the fullness of human life can’t exclude some people — whether intellectually disabled or HIV positive — from married life and the possibility of children. Owens points out that a healthy young woman on ARVs, with a low viral load, who doesn’t breast feed is very unlikely to pass the virus to her baby.

“We are facing one of the most challenging issues in the world today — and in the context of the Catholic Church — and that is the right of the human person to propagate,” she said. “Some people I would imagine would say, ‘Those children should not be allowed to have sex. They should not be allowed to marry. They should not be allowed to have children. They need to be maybe institutionalized, and maybe castrated.’ There are some societies who might say that. So, we’re facing a challenge. That is, the right of the human person to propagate.”

The new challenge is much like the old challenge, says Owens. In 1991, Nyumbani declared that the lives of children bound to die at four or five or six years old had a value, and a right to the full dignity of human life. If HIV-positive children are now bound to live into adulthood, Owens believes they have that same right to a full human life — not a half life.

“Compassion is the word we use. Not pity. We want to call our world to value the human person, no matter what challenges they may have.”

Out in the graveyard, a couple of hours before their evening round of pills, the children run full speed, shout full throated and laugh wholeheartedly. Owens’ response to AIDS in Africa is a fight to see these children live whole lives every minute they are alive.