......They stab at each other with screwdrivers and swing lengths of metal pipe. It is dark and cold, and about 40 filthy, barefoot street children gather on the dirt and concrete strip that divides this capital’s main thoroughfare, waiting for Rodgers Mwewa and his promise of food. The wait is long, and a melee has erupted over a stolen pair of shoes.

Into the middle of this mess wades Mwewa, a 28-year-old Zambian relief worker. Heedless of the danger, he has assembled these children in the wide center of two-lane Cairo Road, which teems with speeding minibuses.

Some 90,000 children live on the streets of Zambia. Many are the sole survivors of families destroyed by HIV. This southern African country of 9.5 million is home to the world’s highest concentration of AIDS orphans, according to the United Nations. More than half of all Zambian children – an estimated 600,000 – have lost at least one parent, most to the epidemic. The country’s future is an abandoned, lost generation.

On this recent night, they fight each other for Mwewa’s pots of stewed meat and n’shima, a bread-like staple made from cornmeal that has the consistency of wallpaper paste. It fills hungry stomachs but provides little nutrition.

Zambia, a British colony until 1964, is one of the world’s poorest countries and one of the hardest hit by AIDS. Death is so common, coffins are sold out of brightly colored vans parked on roadsides.

The teenagers sniff petrol, aerosol cans, anything to remain numb. Their feet are calloused to rawhide. Their clothes hang from bodies stunted by malnutrition.

Steven Chipili is 13 but looks 8. He is scooping meat and n’shima with his fingers. He wears only a dirt-encrusted sweater stretching to his knees. He wallows on the median strip, laughing demonically, as if possessed, at images only he sees.  According to Mwewa, Steven was perfectly normal before he ran from police who tried to shake him down for a pocketful of panhandled money. He was beaten, kicked and left in the street. Mwewa found him the next day and took him to the hospital. That was a few months ago. “The boy has not been right since,” Mwewa says. Last year, in the northern Copperbelt where the mines are giving out and thousands are jobless, Steven’s parent died of AIDS within four months of each other. He had no one else. So he hopped a freight train to Lusaka.

More children arrive each day and quickly learn to survive on charity, thievery and prostitution. Girls and boys who should be in grade school sell their small bodies in order to eat.

Mwewa directs Fountain of Hope, a grass-roots relief agency that barely lives up to its name. If current infection rates continue, the numbers of dead mothers and fathers will increase for at least 20 years, say internal aid groups. Average life expectancy here has plummeted from 56 to 37 years, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. About 20 percent of the population – an estimated one in five adults – is infected. The American rate is 0.57 percent. The impoverished government can spend next to nothing on AIDS or its orphans. It counts on foreign relief agencies to carry an impossible load. Fountain of Hope exists on piecemeal funding from such groups.

Zambia is steeped in tribal taboos and born-again Christianity. Few speak openly of sex or say the name of the virus. In the shantytowns, it is called “the slimming disease”. In the villages, it is “this thing that has come”. No one knows how many orphans carry the virus. No one tests them because it would do no good. There is no treatment here. Even AZT, the most basic of AIDS drugs, is unaffordable in a country where $50 a month is considered good pay.

Zambia’s few orphanages are full. In the villages, children who have lost their parents and most other relatives are bundled aboard buses to Lusaka. Effectively disowned, they are told to find help in the big city. “I put this kid on the bus and I say, ‘Go find your uncle.’ But where are they going to find this uncle? They don’t. He doesn’t exist,” says Louis Mwewa.

Louis Mwewa, no relation to Rodgers, heads Children in Need, an umbrella network representing the few orphan groups, such as Fountain of Hope. “We have to do something. But even the few of us who do something, we are reduced to beggars. I have to run up and down to get money, and all of us, we’re going to the same places,” he said.

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