A DILAPIDATED African orphanage where children with distended bellies subsist on scant rations and battle malaria was the last home for a one-year-old boy reportedly selected for adoption by pop diva Madonna.
Like many of the roughly 250 other orphans at the Home of Hope Orphan Care Centre in Mchinji, near the Zambian border, David Banda faced a bleak future when he was sent here after his mother died.
But Davie, as he is known to the caretakers and other children at the Presbyterian-run orphanage, won a lottery of sorts when Madonna reportedly chose him for adoption shortly after she arrived in the southern African nation last week.
The news that the child would be heading to a new life with a mega-rich pop star was seen generally as a blessing at the orphanage and surrounding villages, prompting some collegial envy among the kids who weren't chosen.
I didn't know Madonna before she came to the orphanage, but I wish I had been the one she adopted. Life is hard here, Anders Malikita, a 14-year-old child at the orphanage, said.
Madonna, who has a son and daughter, has spent most of the past week visiting orphanages and meeting charity workers as part of a campaign to publicise the plight of some 900,000 orphans in this impoverished nation of 13 million people, where AIDS has destroyed many families.
The 48-year-old singer of such hits as Holiday and Material Girl has pledged to donate about $US3 million to the campaign to help these children, many of whom are infected with HIV.
The effort is being led by her Raising Malawi charity.
But Madonna has not confirmed that she plans to adopt Banda.
Her US-based spokeswoman, Liz Rosenberg, said in an email on yesterday: Current legal issues regarding an adoption prevent me from making any official statement. I have been advised by lawyers to say nothing at this time.
Malawi authorities granted her an interim order today to adopt a one-year-old boy from the impoverished African country, a senior court official said.
Madonna and the husband (Guy Ritchie) filed their papers for an interim order this morning at Lilongwe High Court and the judge gave the ruling today, the high court's deputy registrar Thomson Ligowe said.
If placed with the diva, Banda will not have to worry about getting three meals a day like those who still live in his birth village of Lipunga.
Nestled among hills near the Zambia border, many of the youngest villagers have distended bellies, the telltale sign of malnutrition.
If we didn't send Davie away to the orphanage we would have buried him, said Henderson Geza Dyedyereke, the village headman who has confirmed that Banda was being adopted by Madonna.
Although the chief said he was sad to see the child go, he admitted that David would have struggled to survive in his village at such a young age and without a mother.
We were looking for ways of feeding the child at the time but we could not, so we had to send him away, the chief said.
If Banda had managed to live past the age of five he could look forward to making it into young adulthood, where AIDS has become a voracious killer across all of southern Africa.
Reports that the Malawi government may waive its rules on foreign adoption in Madonna's case has also prompted criticism from some charities.
Eye of the Child, a private Malawian child advocacy group, issued an open letter to Madonna this week, questioning whether foreign adoptions were in the best interests of children.
This might upset the child. Normally you have to foster a child for 12 months, Eye of the Child executive director Maxwell Matewere said overnight.
We don't want Malawian children to be taken advantage of.
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