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Shouly’s brow is knitted with worry as she counts through the family’s last few notes. There are five mouths to feed and that is before the rent and school fees have to be paid. “We’re overwhelmed,” she sighs. “The numbers just don’t add up.”

Caroline sits cradling Prince, 6, his tiny fingers wrapped around her thin arms as she thoughtfully strokes his feet. He has outgrown the shoes she bought for him to go to school and there is no money for new ones. “At least we get help from the Church so he can go to school,” she says. “Education is the most important thing.”

From dawn to dusk, adult worries fill their heads, the buzz of them drowning out the rumbles of their underfed stomachs. But Shouly and Caroline are not young mothers, they are children themselves, thrust into adulthood before they even hit puberty in Zimbabwe’s topsy-turvy present.

Walk into any village, any township, in Zimbabwe, and gradually you will sense that something is missing. There are children, playing in the dust with dried-out mealie cobs. There are old people sitting under the shade of a tree, swatting away the flies. But where is the generation in between, the twenty, thirty, fortysomethings on which most countries’ economies and societies depend?

Shouly’s parents died of Aids, only months apart, when she was 12, leaving her the head of her family.

Caroline’s father was shot dead when she was 10, by an armed robber in South Africa where he had gone to work as a physiotherapist as jobs in Zimbabwe dried up. Her mother died two years later from tuberculosis brought on by Aids. At 12, Caroline became de facto mother to her brothers Marcus, 10, and Prince, 8 months. “It was very hard,” Caroline says, the pain of loss still evident on her young face.

As Zimbabwe’s 28th Independence Day anniversary dawns today, those born in that first heady year of freedom can now expect to live, on average, only another seven years. In those nearly three decades, life expectancy has plummeted from over 60 to 34 for women and 37 for men. The chief culprit is HIV, which has spread like wildfire through a population weakened by poverty and hunger, slaughtering a generation.

Others, like Caroline’s father, left Zimbabwe to seek work as its imploding economy melted away job prospects. As many as three million people have left in the past two decades, mostly to South Africa, where they earn the foreign currency that keeps Zimbabwe’s stricken economy afloat – and with it, the man who presided over its destruction. Nobody knows exactly how many Zimbabweans are “missing”, dead or simply gone away, except that they represent almost an entire generation.

“Let’s have an Aids-free generation in Zimbabwe,” pleads a sign along one of Harare’s main roads. It is a prayer for the orphans of this missing generation, but for Gamuchira it is almost certainly too late. Her mother died of Aids two years ago when she was 7. She lives with her “go-go”, or grandmother – the generation whose second turn at parenting has come with the death of their own children. “I thought she was going to be OK right until she passed away,” Gamuchira says of her mother. “But then she sickened and died.”

Gamuchira’s face is beautiful, huge almond eyes fringed with long lashes, but ugly lesions scar her upper lips, one open and red. The marks are almost certainly Kaposi’s sarcoma, the telltale sign of HIV infection worsen-ing into Aids. Gamuchira was probably born HIV-positive and has no idea that she might be carrying the virus that killed her mother. “The grandparents don’t get them tested,” a social worker says. “They don’t think it’s important.”

Simbarashi is 9, still numb from the death of his father on February 21. He barely remembers his mother, who died in 2002. Life is hard at his “go-go’s”. “We can’t afford to buy much food, just porridge in the morning, and sadza [grain] in the evening.”

Incredibly the family somehow finds the pennies to send him to school. Education is highly prized here, a legacy of President Mugabe’s more celebrated early rule, when he built schools and promoted one of the best education systems in Africa. Shouly, 17, is shocked at the suggestion that she pull her siblings out of school so she can afford to feed them. “I can’t have them leave school, it’s too important,” she says.

She has started a hair-braiding business outside their one-room home to try to raise the money to educate them, but it is not enough. A church worker confides they fear that she will soon turn to prostitution. Her ambition for her siblings, however, is that they should live abroad.

Ravaged by Aids

34 Average life expectancy for women

565 Estimated number of adults and children infected by HIV every day

180,000 Zimbabwean deaths due to Aids

1.1m Aids orphans

1.7m Zimbabweans living with HIV

4.4% Percentage of pregnant women receiving treatment to reduce mother-to-child transmission

Source: UN 2006 report on AIDS epidemic, avert.org

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