Do you have a good imagination? Try imagining that you’re a teenager in a small rural village in Africa and your mother and father have started to show the symptoms of AIDS.

What would this be like?

You and your brothers and sisters become responsible for caring for your parents. If you’re the oldest, you also have to look after your younger brothers and sisters.

There are medical expenses. Your family doesn’t have much money saved and it quickly gets used up.

Your parents are weak and can’t work like before, so you have to do more chores and more farm work. Will you still have time or the money to go to school?

You watch your parents die. Then, it’s entirely up to you to put food on the table. Farming is hard work and you don’t know as much about it as your mother or father. Can you plow a field? Do you know when and how to plant or harvest the crops?

Your grandparents help look after you. They know a lot but they’re old and can’t do the difficult work. You do your best but you can’t grow as much food as before. You’re tired and you’re getting hungrier and poorer. To get by, you sell some of your possessions, maybe some of your livestock. But when there’s nothing left to sell, what then?

Maybe you can go live with your aunt and uncle, or other relatives. But they already have a lot of mouths to feed. Can they afford to take you in? What if they have HIV/AIDS too?

How will you survive? What are your options?

Maybe you could leave home and try to make money somewhere else. But living alone far from home can be dangerous. Do you know how to protect yourself from getting AIDS? If you’re a young woman, even if you know how to protect yourself, will you be able to?

It’s not a pretty picture, is it?

Find out more about FAO and the AIDS epidemic.

Felix speaks out

“We wanted to stay together after our parents and grandparents died of AIDS. I want to go back to school, but there is no money… I must work hard to get a good life and look after myself not to get the disease my mother and father had.” – Felix, 15 years old, the sole income earner in a household that includes his five younger siblings and an 80-year-old great uncle