PHOTO ESSAY: Uganda’s villages are filling with older people, bringing blessings and burdens

NABALANGA, Uganda (AP) — Look closely and you will see them.

Atop dirt floors in dim mud huts. At a stream on an arduous walk for water. Beneath church steeples and leaking roofs and a brilliant sun.

In a land known for its massive number of young, a population of the old is quietly ballooning.

It is easy to miss in a country like Uganda, home to one of the world’s youngest populations, where half of its people are under 18 years old. But beyond the frenetic streets of its cities, villages are beginning to swell with older people. It is a familiar story of a demographic shift that countries across the globe have written before, but one unfolding at warp speed here.

Many rich countries took a century to see their percentage of older residents double. Uganda is expecting to quadruple its share of older people over the course of just 40 years.

Similar projections repeat across sub-Saharan Africa.

Follow the web of dirt roads connecting this country’s thousands of villages and study the faces of the old and you will find it is a story of both success and failure.

Watch a wide smile spread across a withered face, or bare feet dance in the dirt, or lips part to burst into joyful song. You feel the pride decades of work to deliver an age of longevity can rouse and the respect with which families and their wider communities feel for those who have reached this chapter.

But see the teeth clenched in pain, the eyes welling with tears, the vacant gaze of a person choked by poverty, and it is clear there is more to the story, that longer lives are so often accompanied by more suffering. Pensions are scarce, training in geriatric care is nearly nonexistent and routine problems of age are unaddressed, left to balloon into catastrophes.

“Old age,” says one 75-year-old woman, “is not something to brag about here.”

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This is a documentary photo story curated by AP photo editors.