Summer camp brings hope to children with HIV

Jiajia (not her real name) looks exactly like other girls her age, maybe just a little smaller.

But after breakfast and dinner, the 10-year-old has to find a private place to take her AIDS medication.

On one of those occasions, Li Lin, a teacher at Dele Home - which means "home for virtue and happiness" - a welfare institution in Nanning, in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, helped Jiajia take out the medicine from a small plastic box and said: "Relax! Just think of these pills as vitamins."

The girl, who was sent to Dele Home when she was 4, then swallowed the tablets.

Later, sitting together at a table in a restaurant in Guangdong's Shenzhen city were some other children from across the country, mostly orphans whose parents died of AIDS and are HIV-positive themselves.

The 24 children were attending a five-day summer camp held by the government-supported Chinese Association of AIDS and STD Prevention and Control and the United States-based pharmaceutical company Abbott Laboratories.

The camp, which started on Aug 18, took the children to beaches in Shenzhen and to Hong Kong Disneyland.

Shen Jie, secretary-general of the association, said the annual activity is aimed at raising public attention to the disadvantaged group of children.

According to some estimates, at the end of 2011, China had more than 8,000 people younger than 15 suffering from HIV/AIDS. Most got the disease via mother-to-child transmission or unsafe blood transfusions.

About 260,000 children in China had lost parents to AIDS by 2010. The figure stood at 76,000 in 2007.

"A significant number of AIDS-orphaned children, particularly those who are HIV-positive themselves, have been abandoned by their relatives and ended up in welfare homes," said Li.

Jiajia is one of them.

She lost her parents to AIDS and because her grandmother was too old to take care of her, she was sent by neighbors to Dele Home, which is run by an HIV/AIDS support group called AIDS Care China.

Life for the 8-year-old Along (also not his real name), who is also HIV-positive, was even harder before coming to Dele.

Two years ago, the shy boy with a tan and big eyes lived on his own for more than 20 days at a brick shanty in a small remote village in Guangxi.

He cooked and took baths on his own. A black dog he called Laohei was his only playmate.

"He didn't speak and had almost no facial expression when he got here. He didn't eat meat at first because previously he had only eaten vegetables and rice for a long time," Li said.

But while waiting for a Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters ride at Hong Kong Disneyland, Along let Jiajia get in line first, with a brief smile.

The two children are now attending a local private elementary school and they're hiding their HIV-positive status.

"We've told them about how to protect themselves at school, like never talking about their disease in front of the teachers and schoolmates," Li said.

Jiajia enjoys her time there.

"I made many friends at school as my teacher told me that life would be easier and happier if I have a lot of good friends," said Jiajia.

Gao Jun, 11, from Fuyang, East China's Anhui province, is somewhat luckier. The freckle-faced boy, who likes to smile, is still popular at school though almost everyone there knows he has the disease, said Zhang Ying, headmaster of the welfare institution where Gao lives.

"I'm the class monitor and ranked fourth at the final-term examination," Gao said with obvious pride.

The boy was featured in the 2007 Oscar-winning documentary The Blood of Yingzhou District, which catapulted China's struggle to take care of AIDS-orphaned children to the spotlight.

In the documentary, Gao, then 5 years old, who lost both parents to AIDS, was rejected by his unmarried uncle, who was healthy, and sent to a local welfare home.

Zhang Ying, who heads the Fuyang AIDS Orphan Salvation Association and the welfare institution, said that the only words Gao uttered at the time were "hit you".

The association, founded by Zhang in 2003, has so far provided support to more than 500 children with HIV/AIDS.

When the children start attending public schools, HIV/AIDS awareness activities are usually held at the school and most of the faculty and classmates are friendly.

Twelve-year-old Mengting, a patient who is also from Fuyang, said she had never heard of Disneyland before.

"I must be the very first person who has been to Disneyland in my whole village," said Mengting, who has a very pointy chin due to fat loss, a major side effect of the drug D4T.

The only person with the disease in her family, Mengting became HIV-positive after being fed with infected breast milk.