Word: orphans
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...Tuesday night, and millions of South Africans are tuning in to find out if the white social worker, Karen, will be able to adopt AIDS orphan Benni - "People who love me always end up dying," the child says. No, it's not Melrose Place or E.R. or any of the other imported dramatic series that fill the country's airwaves. It's a show about South Africans themselves. 'Soul City', the local soap opera that began as a good deed, is now an award-winning, multi-media business internationally recognized for its role in Third World development. It is also...
...Dark and intense with close-cropped black hair, Kim spent a year roaming around North Korea stealing to stay alive before escaping to China. (As with all of the other North Koreans mentioned in this story, Kim's name has been changed to protect his identity.) An orphan, his slight, wiry frame makes him look much younger than his 18 years. The Chinese have already arrested him on several occasions and sent him back: the last time he was put in a North Korean labor camp for repeat offenders. He and his older brother overpowered the guard and ran away...
...orphan, isn't the only one living in fear along this border, where China's ethnic Koreans are concentrated and Korean is as much the lingua franca as Chinese. Unlike the heavily guarded demilitarized zone that delineates North Korea's border with the South, this is a porous, Wild West frontier, teeming with traders, smugglers, government agents and bride traffickers. More than 300,000 North Koreans were in the area in 1999, according to a clandestine survey carried out by Good Friends. The lucky ones live with relatives or find their way to an underground missionary shelter. The others...
...smile. One comely lad in a Taliban school loads a Kalashnikov rifle and obediently proclaims its virtues - it "kills the living and mutilates the dead" - as a mullah praises his recitation. ("Weapons," a visiting doctor says later, "are the only modern thing in Afghanistan.") Another boy, an orphan in the desert, will peddle anything, including himself, to keep going. He attaches himself to an educated Iranian woman who has returned from Canada to save her sister...
...death. Death chose him, even before he was born HIV-positive to a mother who died of AIDS before his third birthday. Back then, his adoptive mother Gail Johnson was told Nkosi had nine months to live, but he went on to be South Africa's longest surviving AIDS orphan. But it was not only his longevity that made Nkosi unique among the estimated 800,000 AIDS orphans in South Africa, whose number grows by 70,000 every year. Propelled into the media spotlight by the AIDS activist community, Nkosi Johnson became the human face of a plague to which...