Rwandan orphanages are full to overflowing as the result of twin scourges: the 1994 genocide and epidemic disease. During 100 days of genocide in April 1994, more than 800,000 Rwandans were murdered. Children lost parents and relatives, entire families were wiped out, and the lives these children had known were shattered. By the end of the genocide, hundreds of thousands of children had been orphaned. With a widening HIV/AIDS epidemic and continuing outbreaks of malaria, a total of 613,000 orphans were living in Rwanda by the year 2001. Over 43% of these children have been orphaned by AIDS. UNICEF officials in Rwanda have called the HIV/AIDS epidemic the "silent genocide."

Today, Rwanda's children continue to face extreme challenges:

• Rwanda has one of the world's largest proportions of child-headed households, with an estimated 101,000 children living in 42,000 such households.
• More than 400,000 children are out of school.
• Rwanda has one of the world's worst child mortality rates - 1 in 5 Rwandan children dies before his or her fifth birthday.

While many orphans are lovingly cared for by extended families, friends or orphanages, the loss of income accompanying parents' deaths often stretches already meager resources to the breaking point. Education can be impossible to afford in a society where it is customary to charge school fees even for public schools. Quality health care is also prohibitively expensive in many places. Yet in the face of all these hardships, children in Rwanda respond with hope and energy.

The brutal impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on children in Rwanda and other sub-Saharan African countries is underscored in a recent UNICEF report entitled "Children on the Brink 2004".

Beyond its humanitarian dimensions, the epidemic will have significant implications for international stability in the years to come. A 2002 paper entitled "AIDS and International Security", by P. W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, is one of a number of scholarly articles analyzing this very real threat.