Inside a rural courtyard in central China's Henan Province, a group of women, with drums tied to their waists, rehearse a dance in the winter sunlight.
Not far away from the courtyard is an open patch of ground, the heart of the village, where several people are doing exercises on the gym equipment installed there.
On one side of the village, a couple of people are tending with vegetable plots sitting next to sprawling fields of green wheat seedlings.
Those are parts of real life scenes taking place at present-day Wenlou, one of the most notorious AIDS villages in the southeastern part of Henan Province. Its dark past could easily go unnoticed and it could be regarded as an ordinary Chinese village if it wasn't for the presence of a highly modernized clinic offering medication and free counseling on AIDS/HIV.
Wenlou has hit the headlines worldwide over the past decade for its high incidence of AIDS, a result of illegal blood deals before1995. Starting from the year 2000, a growing number of the HIV carriers in the village began to develop AIDS and were dying at a greater speed. Forty people died of the killer disease in 2003 alone. The village used to be shrouded by a sense of panic.
It is home to 373 HIV carriers, one tenth of its village population and with one third of all the households in the village involved, and 360 of them have developed AIDS.
A 53-year-old female HIV carrier from Wenlou Village, who prefers to be identified by a pseudonym of Niu He, was diagnosed with the fatal disease in 2002. She made frequent visits to Beijing demanding the government should reimburse her medical bills.
"I became very sick because of the disease and no money to finance medical bills, I was so desperate that I attempted to commit suicide, but I was saved," said Niu.
Liu Yuemei, Party chief of Wenlou Village, said several years back, the public had little knowledge about the spread of AIDS and were full of fear about the disease.
"A simple mention of Wenlou Village would send shudders down the spines of the people and residents from the village were shunned and discriminated by other people in society," said Liu, "for two or three years in a row, young people of marriageable age from the village could not find spouses, so the villagers had to hide their real identities when they went out into society."
Things have started to take change for the better since 2004 when the central Chinese government began to face the pandemic squarely and make arduous efforts to openly tackle the problem.
China hopes to curb the epidemic through leaders visiting AIDS patients, free checkups and medication, intensified publicity work and a nationwide crackdown on drugs.
Beginning from early 2004, the provincial government of Henan, which has turned out to be one of the worst hit provinces by AIDS/HIV pandemic in China, has been dispatching groups of government officials to help improve AIDS/HIV control and treatment work in the 38 most affected villages that belong to 13 counties in six cities -- including Wenlou village of Shangcai county, in addition to setting aside more than 200 million yuan for aiding those villages.
Free medication is now offered to the patients and free schooling to their children; welfare homes are built for children orphaned by AIDS, and officials from the provincial government are stationed in the worst hit villages to fight the disease, build infrastructure and help the villagers support themselves thanks to the concerted efforts made by the central and local governments in recent years to help the AIDS-hit villages in the central province.
And the efforts have proved effective in reducing a sense of fear in the general public toward AIDS/HIV and encouraging them to devote more care toward those victims living with the pandemic.
Xu Guangchun, secretary of the Henan Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), has visited Wenlou twice and helped the villagers earn extra income by building 105 greenhouses to grow edible fungus such as mushrooms on the side of the village.
He plans to turn Wenlou into a pilot village in China's socialist new countryside drive.
Liu Yuemei, Party chief of Wenlou, said the efforts of the central and provincial governments had not only extended the lives of AIDS/HIV victims, but also rekindled hopes in their hearts.
Liu Ping, a housewife from Wenlou, said because of improved living conditions in the village, her 26-year-old son eventually got married in 2005.
"The younger couple have gone to work elsewhere, and we encounter fewer cases of discrimination nowadays," said Liu," I don't think our village is different from other ones."
Wang Zhan, another female AIDS victim also from Wenlou, who used to make a living from pig raising after taking out a loan of 10,000 yuan in 2004, made a small fortune after she sold pigs raised on her farm and paid off the loan.
Wang, who has now moved into the county seat of Shangcai after her son was enrolled in a senior middle school there, sometimes returns to tend her home and the crops. "My hope is that my son can go to a good university."
Niu He, who had just returned from her daughter's home in Beijing, said she would have died a long time ago without the government's AIDS/HIV control efforts.
"I could never expect that I would have the luck to live a modern life as I now have today," said Niu, pointing to facilities such as tap water, a methane gas fired oven and a flush toilet inside her house.
According to China's Ministry of Health, by the end of October 2007, the country had 223,501 people who had been officially reported to have contracted HIV, including 62,838 AIDS patients.
The Chinese government offers AIDS patients various free services, such as free counseling, free testing, free anti-viral medicine and free education for orphans of AIDS patients.
Chinese health authorities have provided anti-viral treatment to 39,298 AIDS patients.
World AIDS Day falls on Dec. 1.
Source: Xinhua
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