Rwanda's orphans
One of the sad realities of the ever-accelerating news cycle is that we rarely have the opportunity to follow an event or issue before it's drowned out by something new. Here's a sobering NYT article about Rwanda's orphans:
Rwanda, a country that suffered 100 days of tribal genocide in 1994 and has also been hit hard by the AIDS epidemic, is believed to have the highest percentage of orphans in the world.
Now a survey finds that depression is alarmingly common among teenage and young adult orphans there who head households and care for younger children.
The survey, conducted by Tulane University researchers working with Rwanda’s national school of public health, appeared in last month’s issue of The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, part of The Journal of the American Medical Association.
While orphans in many African countries are taken in by relatives or neighbors, “such systems are increasingly overwhelmed” in Rwanda, the researchers found, and young people without parents or close adult relatives are having to form their own households or live on the street.
