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.

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