Hope dies for Africa's lost generation
Carol will let one of the men buy her a beer and maybe dance with her for a while. Then they will leave and head off into the night towards a guest house she knows where they can hire a room. He will give her maybe 20,000 kwacha, a little less than £3. If she can fit in another couple of men during the day, she will have earned enough to settle the bill for the room and to buy herself a little food. It is not good money, even by Zambian standards, but for a 13-year-old orphaned by AIDS, with nowhere to live and no-one to pay for her schooling, it is the best she can hope for. Carol has been doing this since she was 11.
Fragile and tiny, Carol sits sucking her thumb, spilling out her pathetic story - parents dead, nowhere to live, no means to pay for the rest of her schooling, friends who told her she could maybe make enough this way to live. She has been raped, she says, and beaten.
[Across sub-Saharan Africa, it is estimated that 25 million children will lose one or both their parents by 2010.]
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