Aids is destroying "everything but hope" in Mozambique, say Unicef Ireland's newest ambassadors.
Actor Stephen Rea and novelist Cathy Kelly are just back from the seventh poorest country in the world where 70 per cent of the population live in abject poverty.
They knew "almost nothing about the place" before their visit. Rea described his first impressions as if coming upon "a Graham Greene, post-colonial landscape. The Portuguese didn't leave anything. Just left the people - with nothing. They left in the late 1970s, and then there was the intense civil war, and now they are being devastated by Aids".
A visit to a "wonderful mother and baby clinic" was a stark instance of the reality of Aids in the country, says Kelly. "These babies were gurgling, waiting to be immunised. And we looked around at all these beautiful babies and were reminded that 20 per cent of them, before their fifth birthday, were going to be dead."
The parents of hundreds of thousands of children had died, leaving many too young to look after themselves. "Some are being brought up by grandparents," says Rea. "Part of the thrust of the Unicef project, even if the parents have got Aids, is to keep them alive as long as possible because then, when they do die, the children are not so vulnerable.
He adds: "The country is a mess anyway but Aids is destroying everything, because basically you have no workforce. There is no one to teach the younger generation farming. They estimate that by 2010 over 9,000 teachers will have died.
"So they know what they have to do. . . But it's very hard to keep that going if you are losing your population."
He found "so heartening" the Mozambique people's determination to build their own country, albeit with outside assistance. The debts of countries such as Mozambique "had to be cancelled".
While the Government contributed €39 million to the country last year, Rea is harshly critical of a first world approach, which "factored in poverty in Africa to how we run global economy. That's not acceptable".
Unicef is launching its Global Parents campaign, to raise money on a monthly subscription basis. Details from www.unicef.ie
