Prakash Mathema / AFP - Getty Images
Fifteen year old Nepalese villager Nirmala Nepali, center, serves food to her sister Sita, 13, and brother Suresh, 10, at their home in the village of Biraltoli in Acham District, some 500 miles west of Kathmandu. As dawn breaks Nirmala Nepali steels herself for another week of cooking, cleaning, back-breaking hard work and the daily struggle to put food on the table that she has faced for many years. Yet she is still a child herself, cast suddenly into the role of head of her household at the age of just six after her mother died of AIDS.
From the full story:
"I'd like to play but if I spend time playing it means we don't eat," she says.
Nirmala's father, a migrant labourer working in Mumbai, infected her mother with HIV on one of his visits home. He eventually died of an AIDS-related illness while he was in India.
Nirmala's story is all too common in remote Achham, one of the poorest regions in South Asia where health infrastructure was ravaged by a decade-long civil war that ended in 2006.
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