Our first week in China was spent on a field trip with the Yunnan AIDS Care Center, the group that we fund to do PMTCT (Prevention of Maternal to Child Transmission of HIV) work in 6 counties in Yunnan Province hard up on the border with Myanmar.
This first picture shows us all in Luxi, the Prefecture seat of Dehong. The group includes those of us that flew in from Kunming and local representatives from the MCH and General hospitals. The director of the Yunnan AIDS Care Center, Dr. Zhou, is two people to the left of me. His wife, Dr. Chen, is in the red shirt over my shoulder.
This first picture shows us all in Luxi, the Prefecture seat of Dehong. The group includes those of us that flew in from Kunming and local representatives from the MCH and General hospitals. The director of the Yunnan AIDS Care Center, Dr. Zhou, is two people to the left of me. His wife, Dr. Chen, is in the red shirt over my shoulder.
The Chinese are really into cheesy touristy stuff. We had dinner in a Dai restaurant (an ethnic minority that lives in this area) and they hauled everybody up to dance afterwards. Here our translator, Haoyu, cuts the rug.
Just to show that we do some real work, at least some of the time, this is a support group for AIDS and intravenous drug user (IDU) orphans. Most are living with their grandparents and the local village doctor brought them together so that they would see that they weren't alone. They learn to sing and dance, and do various handicrafts when they meet. The girl int he middle (in the yellow jacket with blue and white trim) is HIV positive and has been on ARVs for the past 2 years. She never stopped smiling and laughing, it really puts one's own problems in perspective.
This is the same group of girls dressed in Ching-Po ethnic clothing for a village HIV Awareness Festival later that evening. 6 or 7 dance groups performed, interspersed with educational messages and some singers, two of which were reformed IDUs singing about how one shouldn't use drugs (they looked pretty beaten down, even while singing, it was probably a pretty effective message).
The two counties we visited are right next to the Myanmar border so a lot of heroin passes over as it is smuggled to the China coast to spread around the world. Enough falls off the trucks to lead to a lot of heroin addicts which is what initially drove the HIV epidemic here, the scary part is that the epidemic is now spreading into the general population.
That's all for now, we're off to dinner. There are more picture posted at http://picasaweb.google.com/cgrundmann/DehongFieldVisit/
That's all for now, we're off to dinner. There are more picture posted at http://picasaweb.google.com/cgrundmann/DehongFieldVisit/
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