Children and Youth in Pursuit of Care

I now turn to the lives of young people who lost one or both parents, many to the HIV and AIDS epidemic, in the Amatikwe neighbourhood of Okhahlamba. In doing so, I trace the ways in which the young people themselves often sought relationships of care with adults, including relatives and neighbours. A focus on everyday life enables an appreciation of the multiple and varied nature of the young people's lives and begins through a description of their relationships; a description that is at odds with the assumptions of passivity and unmitigated vulnerability circulating in discourse concerning 'AIDS orphans’. ¹