Far from lugubrious, without a whiff of self-importance, he convinces through the quiet force of his personality and the extraordinary drama of his life, simply told. He sits across a desk in a small cramped office, a normal human being doing a superhuman job. When I ask him if he has developed any special emotional defences he says he has not. He cannot afford to show it, he says, but he remains, in truth, as vulnerable as he did on the day he started work.”It always pains you, it always drains you When a little girl of 11 died in ‘99 I almost left I almost could not take it any more It was too much.

But then I thought: if I leave, what will happen to the nurses and the housemothers and the other staff, will they leave too, will they follow my example? I had to stay.”Staying means learning to control your own pain and plunging with enormous wisdom and patience into the world of a group of children who are psychologically damaged in a way science has not yet had time to understand. “Each little child who arrives has, to a degree, been rejected, not been loved, not been touched as a child should.” Those of the children able to acquire some level of normality then have to face the ordeal of school. “They have been treated so cruelly by the other children and even by the teachers. They have been told they are going to die, and have been shunned. Although things are getting better as people become more educated about Aids, the children are still stigmatised. It has been terribly traumatic for them.”The next hurdle comes when adolescence begins. “They start asking why they are here at Nyumbani, why the medicines, why are they different And we tell them frankly.

We have one-on-one counsellors to help them adjust.”Nyumbani – Lumiti does not disagree – is a Rolls-Royce of an orphanage. It was set up by an American Jesuit priest with mostly private American money, and the children would not get better treatment in the finest establishment of its kind in California. Nor would they receive attention more devoted than that which they receive from Lumiti, around whom the children crowd when he goes out among them in the playground, almost as if he were Christ.The beauty and relative opulence of Nyumbani diminishes the tragedy, but also in a way makes it more poignant. “They ask themselves once they are 15 or 16 what their future will be. The problem is they want to be involved in normal life, are impatient to be like normal people their age, have sex, marry, have children.