Magogo: A boy scales the trunk of a jackfruit tree, pawing at his prize, yellow and swollen. Down the road, another child runs beside a bicycle tire with a stick, a phalanx of kids chasing along. Sunlight shines on the young all through this country’s villages and cities, strapped to the backs of their mothers, singing in schoolyards, sailing across soccer fields.
Meanwhile, in the shadows, in crumbling houses and dim mud huts, a new population of the old blossoms.
Across Africa, young and old are divided in their visibility as resources gush toward children and many elderly are left behind. But the fates of old and young are intertwined.
“Both of them are suffering,” says Dr. Emmanuel Mugerwa, who planned to become a pediatrician before switching to geriatric care at a clinic run by Reach One Touch One. “Both of them don’t have a lot of things that they need.”
Africa is home to the world’s youngest population, filled with countries like Uganda, where a staggering half of its people are under 18 years old. While the continent’s population of older people is a tiny minority, it is fast growing.
Together, these bookended age groups share much in common.
Children and people 75 and older have the highest poverty rate, according to Uganda government statistics, and they often live together. Among households with older people, an estimated one in six are “skipped generation,” with grandparents and grandchildren.
At a campus operated by ROTOM, a school is just across from a home where a dozen seniors are tended to by a single caregiver. Uniformed children pray the “Our Father” in an open-air hall on the other side of a wall from an older woman who arrived here with bruises all over that staffers say came from a daughter who beat her with a stick.
It is the final day of school before a holiday break, and two girls in pale red jumpers with periwinkle collars leave campus just as shoeless children begin kicking a ball across a damp field.
The girls exit the property’s gate, walking past a boy whose cheeks are wet with tears, then up a dirt road lined with corn stalks and banana trees. On the periphery, goats graze, ducks and roosters wander and a tower of mud bricks bakes in the sun.agencies