Through education, the children of AIDS victims now have a fighting chance.
Wei Xiong (not his real name) is a skinny 20-year-old student, enrolled in engineering at a Chengdu university. Dressed in a neatly pressed striped shirt and jeans paired with immaculately white sneakers, he seems like any young person poised for a promising future.
But Wei Xiong is unlike many of his peers. He carries with him a dark secret that he shares with only a very few. When he was 15, unscrupulous dealers showed up at his village in the hinterlands of Henan Province, buying blood from the farmers who were eager to make extra money. Among them were Wei Xiong’s parents, who saw it as a quick way to put food on the table for Wei Xiong and his younger brother. They handed over their precious liquid several times.
Unfortunately, these transfusions were conducted under the most unhygienic conditions, which led to the donors contracting AIDS. “Many families had someone who got sick,” Wei Xiong recalls. The scandal was eventually revealed to the world by a feisty Henan doctor Gao Yaojie, who went on to win the Ramon Magasaysay Award – Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize – in 2003 for Public Service.
Wei Xiong’s parents realised they were suffering from the disease when they started to feel weak all the time and kept falling ill. Once they had accepted that death was inevitable, they continued to work hard, says Wei Xiong, “to make sure they would leave us some money after they had gone”. Recently, his father lost the battle against AIDS and passed away at 44. His mother, who is 45, is now severely bedridden.
The Chi Heng Foundation came into Wei Xiong’s life through a poster his father saw tacked up on a wall in the village. Its offer to help in the education of children of AIDS victims seemed unbelievable at first. “How could there be such kind people?” was Wei Xiong’s initial reaction.
And indeed these big-hearted souls were for real. Embodying this collective generosity was the organisation’s founder and moving spirit, Chung To, a former UBS investment banker and Hongkong citizen, who left the corporate world in 1998 to set up the foundation.
Relying solely on the help of volunteers, Chung To visited devastated communities in central China where a whole generation has been decimated and children have had to be cared for by bewildered, if not ailing, grandparents. According to Chinese government statistics, in December 2006, there were 76,000 AIDS orphans – a number expected to rise in the year 2010 to 260,000. (These figures could even be under reported, Chung To believes.)
Since 1998, Chi Heng has received donations from such prestigious bodies as the Clinton Foundation to help underwrite the schooling of these orphans and lay the groundwork for a brighter future. Some are HIV-positive, and the greater majority, not. However, if they are not helped, they all face a lack of opportunity for further education, a potent weapon to battle the enormous stigma and prejudice that is their reality.
Wei Xiong remembers, pain clouding his face, how other villages shunned his community when word got out about the mysterious disease spreading throughout their ranks. “They no longer wanted to buy our watermelons or come near us.” Through regular briefing from Chi Heng staffers, Wei Xiong and his brother now know how AIDS is contracted and are confident they haven’t been infected by their parents. “Although, in the beginning, I was afraid I was,” Wei Xiong admits. However, he remains hesitant to share his story (only one teacher at his university knows), fearful of negative reaction.
Under its AIDS Orphans Programme, Chi Heng helps with the youngsters’ basic needs and tuition, paying the funds directly to school administrators. It also looks after the kids’ psycho-social welfare through workshops such as art therapy and its first winter camp last February in Heifei. To encourage the older students to give back to their communities, it hires them during the summer as staffers to manage the Home Visit Programme.
In March, Wei Xiong and several other Chi Heng-sponsored university students from Henan and Anhui met in Guangzhou to brainstorm on future initiatives and ways to improve current ones.
Of that experience, Zhang, one of the participants, wrote: “I finally got to see Mr To, whom I have heard of and respect, and all of the people who helped us. My worries and concerns suddenly disappeared. I enjoyed staying with them, forgetting that I received help from them. I felt like I was one of them.”
Wei Xiong knows he may not be able to help his stricken mother, and the only way he feels he can live up to his parents’ sacrifices is to do well in his studies. “I treasure the help I have been given, and so I will study hard so I can help others as well in the future.”
Chi Heng Foundation will benefit for the second year running from proceeds of Business Traveller Asia-Pacific’s yearly Silent Auction, which runs from October to December 2007. For more details on the organisation, log on to www.chfaidsorphans.com
Margie T Logarta
