The article examines assumptions circulating in development or interventionist discourse concerning the vulnerabilities of AIDS orphans in South Africa. Ongoing ethnographic research, begun in March 2003, with 31 rural children and youth between the ages of 14 and 22, in Magangangozi, KwaZulu-Natal, points to the ways in which global terms may fail to describe local particularities. Too narrow a focus on the vulnerabilities of AIDS orphans obscures the ways in which they share similar circumstances with other poor children, as well as the strengths they bring to bear on their circumstances. Research methods include: documenting meetings between the children and NGO intervention facilitators; ongoing home visits; the use of open-ended recorded interviews and of theatre techniques; accompanying children in household and agricultural tasks; and facilitating group workshops with the young people outside their community. Findings show the varying circumstances in which the orphans live; the degrees to which they have been accommodated within wider kin groups; their dexterity, knowledge and skill in navigating local environments; and a reiteration of rich sets of cultural understandings and local performance repertoires in holding experience and loss. Some of the implicit meanings in children's rights discourse as filtered through interventionist programmes aimed at AIDS orphans, namely, what it is to be a child, and the social placement of children in relation to caregivers, are thus challenged. (Contains 23 notes.)