Sanbonani -- good afternoon to you all.

As you know, the phenomenal spread of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa is literally wiping out an entire generation of people. The middle generation -- your generation -- the parents! According to the United Nations, 12 million children in Sub-Saharan Africa have lost one or both parents to AIDS. By 2010, they suggest, this number will reach 18 million.

However, despite these daunting numbers, children orphaned by the epidemic can still have safe, healthy and productive childhoods and that is the primary concern of Thatu and the other charity, Kwakhaya, represented here today. A key aim is to enable children to stay in their communities and at school. We need to strengthen the family and social structures that do exist in their communities to enable them to grow up in a home, perhaps their own family home, or with members of their extended families. Many teenage orphans manage their own households and care for their siblings. This has been and can be successful if their households have adequate support from the community and if the children can remain at school.

Many orphans go to live with their grandparents. While they may receive much love and gentleness from their grandparents, the situation is often very stressful for the grandparents as, often, they no longer work or have the means to earn an income. They may even have been financially dependent on their children who have died. Traumatised at the death of their own children, they can find the emotional and financial responsibility of taking care of their grandchildren very stressful.

I met a woman in South Africa recently, a widow and grandmother in her 70s who has lost all three of her adult children to AIDS in the past two years. All five of her grandchildren now live with her, and they range in age from three to 13. She is heartbroken -– for herself, for her children and for her orphaned grandchildren. She has buried all of her own children, who have died in their twenties and thirties. She is also very poor. She told me that one day she only had four eggs to share between the six of them. She is not coping with this kind of stress at her stage in life and she wants the two eldest children to leave school to earn some money for the household so that they might survive.

Thatu is focused on developing and sustaining school and community gardens. School gardens are becoming increasingly popular in South Africa as a way to combat a number of the different effects of HIV/AIDS in a community. Many schools have plots of land around the school grounds that are big enough to be turned into a garden. School gardens are a stroke of genius for several reasons. Gardening is a life skill: by incorporating gardening into the daily activity and life of the school, children acquire invaluable life skills. A child may over a few years work with many different types of plants, fruits and vegetables through different seasons. This is knowledge that might carry them through life. They will always know how to grow their own food -- if they have a patch of garden at home.