(Ecns.cn)--Schindler stands on the mountain, looking down at the Jews that are being tortured by the Nazis, yet he can't look away. This is a scene depicted in the Movie "Schindler's List," but one that has also occurred in the mind of Du Cong, a man who has dedicated himself to helping children infected by AIDS for more than a decade.
"I did not want to be Schindler, but like him I just couldn't shift my attention away from the children who are living and dying with AIDS in our country," said Du, a Hong Kong native.
Du is now in his 40s, and before his first contact with AIDS patients in China during the late 1990s, he never thought he would give up his dream to be a banker on Wall Street.
After he graduated from junior high school in Hong Kong in the mid 1980s, Du and his family immigrated to the United States, where he first got to know about the incurable disease.
On April 24, 1980, Ken Horne, an American citizen in San Francisco, was diagnosed and later confirmed to be the first AIDS case in the United States. Soon, a group of gay people were also diagnosed, and some even died after Ken's case was reported. One of Du's teachers in senior high school even died from the disease.
During Du's 13 years in the U.S., he experienced the rapid development of HIV/AIDS across the country. When he considered the medical conditions in China, Du thought that if the disease landed there the situation would be even worse.
In 1998, Du resigned as vice president at a French bank and returned to China. With the help of his friends, he established a foundation named "Zhi Xing," which means to use one's wisdom to help others. The foundation's first phase was dedicated to promoting knowledge of HIV/AIDS prevention and handing out educational materials to the public.
Unlike in the U.S., many Chinese became infected through selling their blood on black markets, and a particularly large number of them happened to live in villages in central China's Henan Province.
In 2001, Du visited with Gao Yaojie, who is known as the country's first person to stand up and help prevent the disease. Informed by Gao, Du became familiar with the situation in the AIDS villages of Henan, but had underestimated the cruel reality of it.
"I had never imagined people could live like that until I visited those villages," recalled Du.
Because of the disease, many families in the villages had lost their breadwinners: mothers lost their middle-aged sons, while boys lost their fathers. Indigence had forced the villagers to sell their blood, but once infected with AIDS, they were pushed into even worse living environments.
Not only destitute, the people also became the target of social discrimination. They were not allowed to work with healthy people, and the crops they planted could not be sold. For many adults, life became utterly hopeless, and even more so for their infected children.
Going to school was the only way to change the lives of these kids, so Du changed the priority of the foundation to helping kids who suffered from AIDS to go to school and live as normally as possible.
At the beginning, Du talked to every family in the villages and asked them if they needed help, but "Many were afraid to expose themselves, and we are a non-governmental organization, so the work was not easy to conduct at first," he said.
But after the outbreak of another terrible disease called SARS hit China from 2002 to 2003, the Chinese government began to place value on the prevention of AIDS, which gave Du a chance to gain official support.
Hospitals and centers of disease control helped Du to find HIV/AIDS carriers, and Du tried to contact them and locate children who needed help. Du and his team began to send food to families at fixed times, and also persuaded local schools to accept infected students.
Majoring in finance, Du never expected the business to be profitable, but he hoped that what he was doing would continue to help the children. 13 years ago, when he started the foundation, there were no full-time employees, but now Du has offices in 10 provinces with over 40 full-time employees and 200 volunteers.
Currently the foundation provides every primary school student on its list with 200 yuan ($31.4) a year, while 500 to 600 yuan ($78.5 to $94.3) goes to each middle school student and 1,000 ($157.17) is donated to each senior high school student. Collectively, Du has helped 13,000 children, and about 8,400 kids are still receiving assistance.
"Compared to the more than 500,000 kids who are suffering from AIDS, my efforts are small," said Du.
