Frances Vitaglione '63 won't spend her retirement on a Florida beach or golf course or at an early-bird diner. She's found another calling: helping to save the lives of orphans in sub-Saharan Africa.

Shortly before leaving for Malawi in February, Vitaglione explained that taking on the endemic orphan problem in Malawi was a natural step for her. A former coordinator at the North Carolina Museum of National Sciences and lab technician at Sloan-Kettering Institute, she first worked in Malawi from 1964 to 1966 with the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps program was relatively new then, and the biggest threat facing Malawi was tuberculosis. Vitaglione, along with 42 other volunteers, ran a health-care program to give medical attention to those who would otherwise receive none.

"So many of the Malawians worked in the mines of Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe], in conditions which made them extremely susceptible to tuberculosis," said Vitaglione, a biology major at Colby. "We made house calls, tested people for TB and gave shots and medication to those diagnosed with it."

Not much has changed in the 38 years since she worked in Malawi. Poverty and disease still hamper the nation's development. The difference is that now the major threat is AIDS, not tuberculosis. And AIDS is changing the fabric of African cultural, social and economic life.

In Malawi, 20 percent of all people of childbearing age have AIDS; in 1999 this translated into 70,000 AIDS-related deaths. "This left seven hundred thousand orphans," said Vitaglione. "What kind of future do they have?"

This question prompted Vitaglione and her former Peace Corps companions, many of whom now work in the public health field, to establish Malawi Children's Village (MCV) in the district of Mangochi in 1996. Its primary goal is to place the thousands of children orphaned by parents who have died of AIDS with families in the surrounding villages. It also provides medical care for orphans who are severely malnourished or are themselves dying of AIDS. "We selected Mangochi because it is one of the poorest areas in Malawi and one of the hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic," Vitaglione said.

In the spirit of the Peace Corps, Malawi Children's Village is administered and run by Malawians. The staff includes doctors, nurses and volunteers native to the country. "Being community-based is essential to the program's survival," said Vitaglione, explaining that local village families would not trust an institution run by Westerners.

The staff, however, must work without phones, cope with shortages of medicine and equipment and grapple with an obdurate government bureaucracy. These obstacles are added to the challenge of caring for sick and malnourished children in a landscape of famine. And although Vitaglione and her colleagues provide financial assistance and logistical support on occasion, they are constrained by their own resources. MCV is funded through the efforts of Vitaglione and her former Peace Corps companions. Its budget for 2002 was $57,000.

Despite these constraints, Malawi Children's Village has succeeded in placing 3,240 orphans with 1,400 guardian families in Mangochi. "In exchange for taking in a child, the families get free access to the clinic at MCV and supplies of grain during times of famine," Vitaglione said. This is in addition to the free food, supplements and health care that the program provides for the orphans.

While the program's primary goal is to support orphans in their new homes, the project also involves trying to establish vocational training and small enterprise activities to help the children integrate into society once they graduate from secondary school. "We're trying to do everything we can to make sure these children have a future," Vitaglione said.

Yvonne Siu '03