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Introduction
'And this is where we've buried our sons', said Lydia, a widow aged in her eighties, pointing to a site in her compound. 'A grandson by one of the late sons of ours also has a grave there', she went on to say, still looking towards the graveyard.
Lydia and her co-wife, Sara, are amongst the oldest people living in their village in southwest Uganda.1 Over the last 25 years they have seen their younger relatives and neighbours die as a result of the AIDS epidemic. Losing children through disease and war is not new in Uganda (Kasozi 1994), but the scale of the loss from one cause over a prolonged period has had a major impact on many older people's lives (Knodel, Watkins and VanLandingham 2003). Until recently the focus on older people in studies of the AIDS epidemic in Africa has been on their role as grandparents caring for children left behind when their parents die (Foster et al. 1995; Foster 2000). Very little attention has been paid to the impact of the epidemic on different age groups of older people. Some research has looked beyond the grandparental role to the wider impacts of AIDS on older people but nonetheless has treated all those aged 60 or more years (and sometimes 50 or more years) as homogeneous (e.g. Knodel et al. 2001a, 2001b, 2007; Knodel and Im-em 2004; Knodel and VanLandingham 2002; Knodel, Watkins and VanLandingham 2003; Wachter et al. 2003; Hosegood and Timaeus 2006; Merli and Palloni 2006). Dayton and Ainsworth (2004) did breakdown by age those aged 50 plus in a quantitative analysis of the impact of the deaths of people aged 25-49 years on elderly people in Kagera, Tanzania, but only gave the number affected in each age group. Even the detailed ethnographic research of Williams and Tumwekwase in Uganda (1999a, 1999b, 2001; Williams 2003), which provided some insights into the impact of AIDS on people of different ages, did not pursue age-related differences.
We conducted a 12-month ethnographic study in 1991-92 of the impact of HIV and AIDS on 27 households in rural Uganda. A 'second wave' during 2006-07 included...