It was not a particularly cold morning. I walked over to the German Embassy to hand in the package for my VISA application for a short studying vacation in Germany. Soon inside the VISA office, I found the place crowded with fellow Chinese citizens waiting for their interviews. Most were young students, some dressed in expensive business suits, and a few older couples, maybe to join their sons and daughters overseas for the coming holidays.

I waited about half an hour before my number was called on the plasma screen. And a young looking Chinese VISA officer waived me to her window.

Soon her question was directed to my work at PTE. And one special question aroused my greatest interests and had me thinking all the way back to the office. Upon finishing listening to my answer to what exactly we did at PTE with 2 full-time staff and one intern, she commented, all the work you did, with university red cross and district CDC, the online advocacy, counseling and film, weren’t these all for young intelligent people, who have the source to look up information and avert HIV AIDS? Why didn’t you focus on people living in rural areas?

At the time, I only introduced to her our involvement with local charities near Beijing, to the extent our limited resource would allow for. And that got carried away to a discussion about Christianity in China. But what I really wished I had told her was that, the reason HIV AIDS has become such a big threat here, is that everyone is of the equal exposure without proper protection. In the cases we heard and saw, young educated Chinese people were no better than people from rural areas to protect themselves against the threat of HIV. Young people’s sexual experiment and risky behaviors put them in even greater danger than those from rural areas.

And that lead to another thing I wish I had told the visa officer. The work we do at PTE, is not only to tell people, esp. young students to have safe sex or no sex, but rather more importantly, we want to tell them the vast HIV population living in China’s rural area was produced by something historically extremely unfortunate, exceeding anyone’s premonition. These victims of the virus should not also be the victims of the discrimination associated, which is only worsened by stereotyping their poverty and peasant status.

I also wanted to tell the VISA officer that today sex transmission is the number 1 method of transmission of the virus in China. Lots of young people, even students in universities and middle schools have fallen prey to the virus. China’s economic uprising, young people’s newly found sense of freedom and even boldness are not matched by our education system or social attitudes toward various new phenomena.  And PTE has to serve as a small but steady voice to continually broadcast the seemingly obvious yet hard-to-cut-through messages on HIV in China.

It is not possible to tell who carries the virus. But for those we do know live in tough situations because of the virus, let’s show a little more respect to the fights they are putting on. And let’s help whatever we can to make their struggle just a tiny bit easier. And for young people, let us hope some of PTE’s creative campaigns would reach and find those who share our concern and can join our efforts, and help those who haven’t yet been aware of the danger of their sexual audacity.

Well, guess you have to come and check it out yourself before you know what we are doing there. One thing is for sure. It costs you nothing. And you may bring back something other than knowledge about AIDS.

Also, remember, if you have questions about HIV/AIDS, log onto our HIVZX.com

With the tireless efforts and many sleepless nights of editing, Qi and Zheng, both undergraduate students from Tsinghua Art Academy, leading their school mates and PTE’s volunteers, produced this short drama, based on a story written by PTE’s Minhoo.

It’s a fresh attempt to catch eyes of China’s young people to contemplate on the growing impact of this imported virus on today’s young generation. The film is also chosen by university level Red Cross to assist their training of Peer Education facilitators from all major Beijing universities.

These 58 HIV positive people came to us through a partnership we have with a wonderful and dedicated group of nuns working in Hebei province (outside of Beijing).  We have enjoyed a wonderful working relationship with them over the past year and when they came to us with a request to help with the winter clothing we thought there could be no better way to spread a little holiday joy than to help these people in great need.