Kevin’s Questions

Miles Roston

Exisle

Otago Daily Times, January 20th 2007

“Does it matter to anyone if there is one less of us? Does it matter if any of us live or die?”
Kevin’s Questions addresses one of the hidden tragedies of the Aids epidemic — the 15 million children (many themselves HIV positive) orphaned by the disease.
This equates to all of the children in New Zealand, 17 times over, but because most are in sub-Saharan Africa the Western world seems to neither know nor care.
Made doubly powerless by their youth, they are silent victims reliant on a small number of adults to give voice to their plight. Miles Roston began his own advocacy campaign in 2001 with a documentary on Kenyan orphans, 4 Million Dreams.

One of his subjects was a 12-year-old boy called Kevin, who had survived alone for two years by selling roasted peanuts to earn money, and sneaking into school because he couldn’t afford the fees. Nobody knew of his mother’s death because he was too ashamed to admit she had died of Aids.

This extraordinary degree of strength and resourcefulness in one so young was typical of all the children Roston met, and it was this appearance of being “fine”, rather than the depth of their need, that dominated the final film. After much thought, Roston decided he needed to become emotionally as well as intellectually involved, and returned to Kevin with a proposition — to take part in a film in which the children interviewed the grown-ups, asking local and international leaders what “they” could do to help them, and how they could keep themselves safe from the disease.

Those interviewed ranged from village elders to the Kenyan vice-president, from drug company directors to religious authorities, from Nairobi to New York. The “childish” questions put to them, cut to the heart of the problem and challenged global leaders for direct answers. The responses are at times dismaying, particularly the widespread allegation that condoms do not prevent infection (“don’t even think of using these condoms but pray to the Lord”), but there are signs that at higher levels, governments are beginning to recognise and address the issues.

We see Kevin transformed from a shy and uncertain boy to an articulate and confident future leader, but it is more than just his story.

It is about all the people who face the day-to-day reality of Aids; the dying mother who makes a memory book for her son, so that part of her remains with him when she is gone; the homeless street children who haunt the garbage dumps of the Kenyan capital. And most of all it is about the orphans themselves, standing together to make themselves heard in the global community.

This may not be the most literary of books, but that is irrelevant. What is important is that we hear Kevin’s questions.