Rite and Reason: In Africa the future is becoming increasingly dependant on its older people, writes Justin Kilcullen.
Just outside Lilongwe in Malawi is a township of mud huts. It has grown over the years as more and more rural poor were drawn to the city in search of work. As in so many such places in Africa today, the HIV virus was prevalent among the residents. UN AIDS statistics showed that almost 15 per cent of Malawian adults aged 15 to 49 were HIV positive last year.
One recent Sunday afternoon I visited this township with Irish missionaries who had set up a project to support those who were taking care of the ill and helping them to die a peaceful death. In one house we visited I encountered an elderly woman and three young children.
In the shadows was a bed on which lay the children's mother, in the last throes of life. Her husband had died two years previously of AIDS. She would soon follow him from the same condition. The children's grandmother was left to look after them. However, she seemed not to have the energy necessary for the task.
This was a scene repeated throughout the township and through the townships of Africa. As HIV/AIDS rips through the young adult population, older people, especially women, increasingly provide healthcare and support for the infected. They are also responsible for the financial and emotional support in the rearing of their orphaned grandchildren, many of whom are themselves HIV positive.
Pope John Paul II in his Lenten message this year asked us to reflect on the role of the elderly in society today. In our own affluent western society, of course, the issues to which the Pope referred were about helping the elderly to live to their full potential by placing them at the service of the whole community.
He referred to the elderly sometimes finding themselves "a burden to the community, sometimes to their own families, living in a situation of loneliness" that led to them being "isolated or discouraged". Pope John Paul even asked what would happen if we were to yield "to a certain current mentality that considers these people, our brothers and sisters, as almost useless when they are reduced in their capacities due to the difficulties of age and sickness".
These are indeed issues that face our society here in Ireland, and the Pope was right to draw our attention to them. But what a contrast with the role of the elderly in sub-Saharan Africa today.
Far from the elderly being neglected and ignored, a recent WHO report stated: "The safety net provided by the extended family is identified as the most effective community response to the AIDS crisis, and older women are increasingly heading these extended families."
Here at the heart of the greatest problem facing Africa today were the elderly, who in our society feared a life of neglect, loneliness and abandonment.
There is a cruel irony in all of this for these unsung heroes of today's Africa. With no social welfare system in place to support the elderly, the one form of social insurance available to African couples is their children.
Having many children meant they could share the support of their parents in their parents' old age. However, the HIV/AIDS pandemic has seen the decimation of the young parents of today. We now have a situation where, with the demise of their children and no other support base, elderly people have been orphaned in reverse. Orphans raising orphans.
The Pope said that, according to biblical understanding, reaching old age was a special divine gift.
To us in the developed world it is a gift tarnished by the fears of which the Pope spoke "a sense of uselessness, being a burden, loneliness".
In Africa today old age is proving to be a gift not so much to those who have achieved it but to society at large. Here the elderly are not the burden, they bear the burden. They rear the next generation, the hope for Africa's future.
Trócaire's Lenten campaign is an act of solidarity with the poorest people in today's world. We give generously to help those less well off than ourselves. But the Lenten campaign has always been about a two-way relationship.
Trócaire has always tried to present the societies of the developing world as partners from whom we can learn many things about values, community and the need to build a world of interdependence.
As John Paul II challenges us to reflect on the life of the elderly in today's world, perhaps we do have something profound to learn from the old people of Africa.
(Pope John Paul II's Lenten message can be accessed on the website www.trócaire.org or www.lent.ie)
Justin Kilcullen is director of Trócaire.