I'm posting this against my better judgement

Listen guys. Don't get the wrong idea about Botswana. Its very developed in some places. Its very rural and undeveloped in others. There are pockets of people who are having a rug pulled from under them. Botswana is developing so quickly. The HIV prevalence rate is high. Some people just don't know what to do, so they're clining to tradition because that's all they feel like they can do.
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Disclosure for children:
They said there’s a lion. You must take the ARV’s to put the lion to sleep. If you don’t take your medication, he will wake up and attack the soldiers that protect you—he wants to eat you, you see, so one should take their ARV’s every day. Never default lest the lion learn a way to trick you.
“How old are you” I asked in the stupid voice I use to talk to young children.
“I’m 14.”
He mumbled and looked down when he spoke. I wouldn’t think much of this, because lots of children mumble and don’t make eye contact, but this kid didn’t mingle with the others. He sat by himself. His head hung low; his thin skin was thin and lucent like dark brown wax paper. It didn’t do much to drape the gloom underneath.
“No, you’re not. How old are you really?” I asked with that same stupid high pitched voice that Americans use when talking to children.
Julie’s NGO, is a small Community Based Organization that is coordinated by an old woman. It’s named after the old woman’s dead daughter, Clara. She was a prominent HIV/AIDS activist and one of the first people in Botswana to publicly disclose her status. Clara began planning an OVC childcare center for the children in small, rural underserved villages around the area; the villages in the time capsules, like her home village—Seokomelabagwe—a small village with a big name. A pride of lions are roaming in the bush. Perhaps it’s a sick parent, a dying parent, a dead parent, more often than not, it’s both parents, or a sister, brother, aunt, uncle. The lion is there and not only does he eat people, he smacks others just to make his presence felt and known. Children are left without parents. Family members take in the children of dead relatives. Multiple relatives have died. Multiple children have been taken in. Rural areas have been affected the most. Unfortunately, HIV is easier to transmit than passion and efficiency, so both the passion and the virus that sparked it, were buried with Clara when she died of AIDS related illness. Now all that’s left is a sack full of dreams, a Peace Corps volunteer named Julie with a NGO that is run sloppily—that’s not being run at all. It has no building, no office, no direction, nothing but a Peace Corps volunteer whom the elderly and inexperienced board and coordinator don’t listen to.
I was sitting next to him. I smiled.
“How old are you really?”
He didn’t respond and Julie said she thinks he’s really 14. She’d done the same thing before I got there. We both limped away, feet in mouth. We were meeting the children at Julie’s NGO for site visit. Her NGO is a fledgling childcare center. I found out the 14 year old boy who looked 8 or 9 was eaten by the lion when Julie saw his name in my S&CD office two months later. My counterpart told me that he’d been buried that past weekend. He has AIDS and defaulted on his ARV’s because his mother “was drinking too much.” I felt slapped by a big, heavy feline paw because I had no idea and never would have guessed he was HIV positive despite the fact that Clara’s Childcare is an NGO that focuses on Orphans and Vulnerable Children. His mother was there. He wasn’t an orphan. I assumed he was sickly. Lupus perhaps. Malnutrition maybe. HIV would have would have explained why his mother was also sickly and frail looking, it would have explained his disposition. Not only was he physically sick, but he was withdrawn, unhappy in a way that children rarely ever are. Even the poorest of the poor children smile. They play. They interact with others but during the site visit, he didn’t smile. He didn’t interact with other kids. He just sat there, waiting for the lion to pounce. He knew it was coming. There’s a generation of HIV+ children, who were born before ARV’s, right on the cusp of their availability and so they got them just in time, just before they wasted away as toddlers and died of AIDS related illnesses. They weren’t introduced to a lion living inside them. They were just told that they were born with HIV. Three letters come with a lot of meaning that they didn’t create or craft. They could put the lion to sleep before he got to them but healthcare providers hadn’t standardized a disclosure method for children born with HIV.
A mound of ambition, a good idea digested and then shat out into a now festering pile. Trying. Trying so hard, to take it, turn it into manure, and get something to grow while a hungry, very alert lion, still roams.