The Fuyang Aids orphanage is at the frontline of a life and death struggle
LI ZHENGZHENG was two years old when she was dumped in a garden near an orphanage in Fuyang, a city in the poor Chinese province of Anhui.
Although nothing was known about the little girl’s background, tests soon established that she was HIV-positive. Zhang Ping, who runs the Fuyang Aids Orphan Salvation Association that took the little girl in, believes Zhengzheng’s parents are dead and her relatives didn’t want to look after her, afraid of the social stigma and the cost of caring for a sick child.
HIV/Aids has become the leading cause of death by infectious disease for the first time, the Chinese government announced this month. It has overtaken tuberculosis and rabies to get to the top of a grim table. Some health experts dispute the data, but HIV/Aids is being recognised as a major killer and the Fuyang Aids orphanage, set up by Zhang in 2003, is at the frontline of a life and death struggle.
Zhengzheng, now three, gives the impression of being a healthy child. The disease is in check, because she is receiving the medical and emotional care she needs. Bundled up in a bright orange coat against the penetrating damp of a Fuyang winter, she rushes around happily with a group of four other children with HIV in the orphanage. For cost reasons, 495 other HIV-affected children are being cared for in the local community outside. Most of them are orphans whose parents have died of the illness, and 50, like Zhengzheng, have contracted the disease. The association tries to place as many of the orphans with families, often foster families where the parents are HIV positive because non-HIV/Aids-affected families are generally unwilling to take children with the illness.
Zhang started the community-based NGO in her home town, Fuyang, which provides labour for the booming cities of the eastern seaboard, southern China and Beijing, but is seeing millions return home as the economy slows.
Once a worker at a state-owned enterprise, Zhang had worked with HIV/Aids orphans for several years, but a trip with a US doctor, Kay Johnson, to a local village allowed her to witness first hand the devastation of Aids on families and communities.
Millions of people in rural China have had their lives destroyed by HIV/Aids, in poor provinces such as Henan and Anhui. Poor farmers became infected with the disease when selling their blood to profit-making blood-collecting agencies, which established networks among rural communities.
Some of these were legal, part of a national drive to source blood plasma for booming biomedical companies, but an unquantifiable number of illegal blood stations were also set up, and some farmers would traipse from village to village to donate blood for cash in unmonitored, unsanitary stations.
The blood collected would be pooled by blood type, which means many more people in China have become infected through transfusions of blood. The number of HIV infections began to rise and in 1998 the government banned the practice.
This ban, however, was not backed up with any kind of campaign to change attitudes to HIV/Aids, and those infected with the disease had to deal with backward attitudes. Sick people were shunned by their neighbours, and when the parents died, their children were abandoned, often by members of their own families.
As well as blood transfusions and blood sales, a growing number of people in China are getting sick from sexual contact and intravenous drug use.
However, the government policy on HIV/Aids has become more open, and photographs of senior leaders such as President Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao embracing Aids patients have done much to reduce the stigma attached to the illness.
“Discrimination is quite severe, and China’s Aids publicity work needs to improve,” said Zhang in an interview in the activity centre, one of the facilities run by the NGO to look after the children. “But a lot has been done.”
Gao Jun has become a film star as one of the central figures in Ruby Yang’s moving, Oscar-winning documentary about the plight of Aids orphans in China, The Blood of Yingzhou County, which featured Zhang and these children who led her to set up the orphanage.
In the film he is a disturbing sight, a lost boy, three years old and unable to look after himself, shaking his head from side to side.
“No non-Aids family would take care of him, or even bathe him. His foster family found him too difficult to look after because he’s often sick, so we look after him ourselves,” said Zhang as we drive through the chaotic streets of Fuyang to the house that the NGO has rented to look after some of the children.
Here little Zhang Yue (4) gads about, looking suspiciously at the visiting foreigner. Her parents came from Henan but moved to Xinjiang to work, but they were already infected with HIV/Aids. Her mother died 15 days after she was born, and she was adopted by a healthy family, who gave her up when they discovered that the child was also HIV positive.
The rented rooms are basic, but the accommodation is warm and the rooms have been painted in lively colours to lift the children’s spirits.
“Gao Jun’s had two foster families but at one point he was so sick he couldn’t lift his head, so we hired this house from a friend of mine and a granny to look after him,” she said.
The five orphans in the house also go to school there. Gao Jun is now eight years old and is working away at his painting with his friend Mi Hualong, who also has HIV and was dumped in a railway station when he was four. Zhang expects the number of orphans to increase by eight or 10 this year.
“The number of new HIV carriers we are seeing come less from blood sales, more from other ways.
“We plan to buy a house to centralise all our activities – the community centre, the accommodation and the school. But our financial situation is dire right now.
“The downturn means donors are turning away from us, and some of the children are waiting for funding,” said Zhang.
In the classroom, the orphans line up to sing a song about answering the telephone.
Then stand in a line to sing a song that is almost unbearably poignant, one that makes it seem like the sky darkens further outside when they sing: “When I grow up, I will listen to my mother’s words . . . When I grow up, I will protect my mother.”