Imagine being 64 years old, virtually penniless and mourning the death of your child as you raise grandchildren orphaned by AIDS.

A cry for help will sound from coast to coast as African grandmothers and their young charges ask Canadians to help fight an HIV killer still stalking their homeland.

It's all part of the Stephen Lewis Foundation's AfriGrand Caravan AIDS awareness tour, including 40 stops from St. John's, N.L. to Victoria, B.C.

Nonkululeko Nowathe, 17, and Regina Mokgokong, a 68-year-old grandmother who's raising her sick niece's four children, prepared Tuesday to start the first leg of the trip in St. John's.

They are a long way from home in Mamelodi, South Africa, just northeast of Pretoria.

Nonkululeko had never been on a plane before heading to Newfoundland. Her mother died in January from AIDS and, like millions of other African children whose parents have succumbed to the disease, she is now living with a grandparent.

"HIV-AIDS really has a massive impact because the children in my community have to leave school ... to look after their parents," she said in an interview.

A home care nursing service funded by the foundation has helped Nonkululeko stay in school, she said. She hopes to become a lawyer one day who will work on cases involving AIDS treatment and the quest for a cure.

Another African grandmother and grandchild will continue the journey west from Guelph, Ont., later this month, and a third pair will finish the trip by Nov. 10.

The Toronto-based Stephen Lewis Foundation is trying to raise $100 million for grassroots AIDS projects in Africa over the next five years.

The disease is still devastating sub-Saharan Africa where cash promised from the world's wealthiest countries has fallen short.

Grandmothers who count on being cared for by their children are instead left to mourn their deaths as they struggle to raise grandkids — often with no pensions or old-age security.

According to United Nations estimates, AIDS is the leading cause of death in sub-Saharan Africa, killing 1.4 million people in 2008 alone. Another 1.9 million people, most of them young and many of them parents, became infected with HIV.

Progress made through education campaigns is tempered by lack of access to treatment and widespread poverty.

Ilana Landsberg-Lewis, executive director of the independent Stephen Lewis Foundation, says it has funded more than 300 HIV-AIDS projects in 15 African countries since 2003.

They include counseling on HIV prevention, medical care, food distribution, home care, grief counseling and support for grandmothers raising second families.

Africans on the frontline of the crisis know best what's needed — but they lack money, she said.

"Considering how desperate the need is and how much headway is being made by people in communities across sub-Saharan Africa, one really has to wonder: What are the leaders in the world doing?"

Her father Stephen Lewis — former politician, broadcaster and diplomat — has chided comparatively rich Group of Eight nations for not living up to their African promises.

On the eve of the G8 meeting in Ontario last June, he cited three reports assessing how well those countries had kept their 2005 pledge to provide $25 billion in extra funding to Africa by 2010.

Those reports, including one from the G8 itself, underscored a shortfall of between $7 billion and $9.8 billion.

Landsberg-Lewis says the AfriGrand Caravan will reach out to individual Canadians, including more than 250 grandmothers groups that have sprung up across the country to support the cause.

"The foundation hasn't asked for or received government money."

Jean Douglas-Webb, 64, founded a grandmothers group in Abbotsford, B.C., where the caravan will stop Nov. 3.

She paid her own expenses to take part last May in a conference in Manzini, Swaziland that united 500 African grandmothers with 42 Canadian grandmas.

"I met this amazing woman who was the same age as me," she recalled in an interview. "She's raising five orphaned grandchildren herself and she still has two of her own children (at home)."

The conference ended with the Manzini Statement, a call for pensions, property rights and basic social supports denied so many people in Africa, especially older women.

"They have so much to struggle with that we simply don't," said Douglas-Webb. "And it's just wrong."

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