The first day I visited AHOPE, an orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which houses HIV positive children, he sidled up to me and held onto my arm. He didn’t speak much English, and I spoke even less Amharic, but Biniam was able to communicate what was most important to him: being loved. Biniam’s father had died – most likely from AIDS. His mother is HIV+ and brought him to an orphanage when she felt she could no longer take care of him.

Biniam is a coffee colored, round faced boy with Koala bear eyes. He is seven years old, and because he is living at AHOPE, he has no chance of being adopted. The orphanage has two separate compounds; one for babies and toddlers, and this one, for the older children. Thirty-three kids live here – from five-year-old Tilahun who is too young to be here, but stays because his older sister and brother are also here – to 12-year-old Abebe, who lost both his mother and his baby brother to AIDS. The kids sleep in cramped bedrooms and play with a lone soccer ball.

The second time I visited AHOPE, all thirty-three children were in the main room of the orphanage, glued to the television watching a soap opera. The room serves as living room, dining room, crafts room, and play room when – like that day -- it is too wet to go outside.

As I came into the room, one of the staff shooed a child off the comfortable chair and encouraged me to sit down. As soon as I did, Biniam came and stood by me. He put his hand on my shoulder and then snuggled his way between my chair and the next one so that he could hold my hand. We watched the video as the rain poured down outside, and when there was finally a break in the deluge, I got up to leave.

Biniam followed me. “Nega” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Nega?” he asked.

“Ashi, nega” I said. Yes, I would be back the next day. But still he held onto my arm until I had to pry his fingers off as I opened the steel gate to leave.

When I did return the next day, there was Biniam, running – and I mean RUNNING – toward me the minute I came in the gate. He grabbed my arm and began to speak to me in Amharic. I didn’t understand any of his words, but his message was clear. He didn’t want me to go off with the girls (who seemed to want to show me something in their bedroom.) He wanted me to stay there with him.

During the next few weeks, every time I went to AHOPE, I struggled with the feeling of inadequacy – what can one person, especially an American, an English-speaker, do to help these kids? I came to Ethiopia because I had been haunted by a line in a magazine article: “What will you tell your children you did during the AIDS crisis in Africa?” I don’t have any medical training, and I don’t have much money. But I figured I knew how to play with kids. Yet I struggled with the language barrier and with my lack of ideas for connecting with children with whom I could not quite communicate.

And I struggled with Biniam. He never let me out of his sight. He hung on my arm from the minute I walked into the compound until I left for the day. He followed me around, and when I went into a storeroom which was off-limits to the kids, he stood outside and whined my name until I came out. When I was teaching a crafts class and put the boys in one room and the girls in another (the classrooms were too small to fit all the kids in one), Biniam edged himself into the girl’s room every time I went to check on them.

“Set lej?” I’d taunt in my broken Amharic. “Are you a girl?”

“Ashi” he would lie with a charming smile. So I would have to drag him over to the boy’s classroom and tell him to sit down.

A few weeks later, I learned that it was possible that some of the children at AHOPE might not have HIV, but there was no money to pay for testing to find out. I was able to gather donations from friends to pay for the testing, and the medical director arranged for the lab to send technicians out to the orphanage.

Biniam started whimpering the minute he came into the room. For once, he didn’t want anything to do with me. But after whining and crying for longer than I thought I could bear, he finally let the technician draw his blood. Then he begged and begged until I gave him one more piece of candy – the reward for allowing the needle stick.

The next day we learned the results of the testing: eighteen of the AHOPE orphans, the kids that had been assumed to be and had been labeled HIV+ were, in fact, negative. Eighteen of the children now had a chance to be adopted or returned to their extended families. Eighteen children now could be moved out of a place where they were at risk for contracting the disease that had already killed their parents.

Biniam was one of them. Two weeks later, his family came to get him. They thought that they could take care of him now, because he didn’t have HIV after all. They took him away before I got a chance to say goodbye.

I was surprised at how much I missed him.

I’ve been back in the States for almost a month now, and I think often of the dozens of orphans I met during my time in Ethiopia, but I also think about the hundreds of thousands of other orphans living there. It is estimated that a million children have been orphaned by AIDS in Ethiopia alone; over 15 million on the continent of Africa. My twelve weeks working at the orphanages was such a small drop in a very large bucket. But I am reminded of the parable of the child walking along the seashore where thousands of starfish have been beached. As he methodically picks up one starfish after another and throws it back into the life-saving water, an adult chides him. “Can’t you see that there are too many starfish, and you can’t really make a difference?” The child picks up another starfish and throws it into the water. “Well,” he says, “I made a difference to that one.”

Rita Radostitz is the assistant editor of Etude.