TAG = "CDC"

Photos of the HIV/AIDS & Health Information Center set up by our local partners in Mangshi Town. The centre is located in the middle of town adjacent to a busy market, and in a part of town where many sex workers live.

Read more about the Health Information Center

Our local partners opened up an HIV/AIDS and Health Information Centre in Mangshi during the summer of 2008. The purpose of this office was (a) generally, to provide an information centre for the people of Mangshi to come and find out more about HIV/AIDS and how to prevent and live with the disease and (b) specifically, to provide a safe place for sex workers to meet and receive prevention materials such as condoms, and a safe place to test their blood for HIV.

View slideshow of the Health Information Center

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Participants

Usually our programme activities involved, besides us, the villagers, CDC experts, a couple of village committee members. But this time there was something special. The village committee members paid real special attention to the programme, so they invited the Mangshi Town’s Party Secretary and vice governors, and Mr. Zhao, head of the Mangshi Town Hospital, brought another head of the hospital and a doctor. The head of the CDC invited the head of Luxi County HIV/AIDS Bureau. The village committee also arranged a singing and dancing for entertainment. Ben also joined the session. Therefore, we had a really big group on our part.

Activities

As usual, we bought small gifts such as towels, tooth-brushes, tooth-pastes, washing pwder, soaps, mosquito coils for the village families as well as some pencils, erasers and exercise books for the village students.

The activity began in the evening around 9 o’clock. The Dai villagers usually finish their supper around 8 o’clock, so when they gathered around the meeting place, it was around 8:30 p.m. But when everything was ready, it was about 9:00 p.m. Nearly 300 villagers participated.

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Claire’s (in-country project manager) personal account.

In August it rained a lot in Dehong Prefecture, which is a sub-tropical area. Usually it rains throughout the season from June till September, so we decided to carry out the project in different ways. In June and July we couldn’t make up our minds.

Then in late July we decided to set up an INFORMATION INQUIRY CENTRE on a street in Mangshi Town. Most sex workers live in the neighbourhood, and it is also where the market is located. Every day people trade for goods here; and every five days it is a centre of larger-scaled market, when people from towns and villages all over Luxi City come here to sell and buy things.

We set up the CENTRE at this location because it is really the centre and we can more easily get access to common local people who need our service. We furnished the CENTRE on August 6-7 with a TV, a big cupboard, some tables, desks, stools, and some brochures, pamphlets on HIV/AIDS and some sexual diseases such as the clap, syphilis, etc. Condoms are in the glass cupboard so that people visiting our CENTRE can see and ask for them if they need some.

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Claire’s (in-country project mananger) personal account.

On the evening of May 17, Claire together with some CDC people held a very interesting and successful programme activity in a Jingpo village known as Yunqian Village. It is one of the villages under a greater Yunqian Village Committee, which is about 35 km from Mangshi, capital town of Dehong Prefecture, and includes 5 Jingpo villages and 1 De’ang village.

Three Jingpo villages were involved, and totalling 113 households! We had planned to include 87 households in two villages only, because the third village is about 4 km away rom the venue, but unexpectedly many young men and women from those 26 families in the third village came upon the news that we were doing an interesting programme. It was really inspiring!

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De’Ang First Training Slideshow 1 De’Ang First Training Slideshow 2

Well the 1st session I would have to say was a great success. We had hoped for 50-75 people and over 125 people came. It was done in a De’Ang village (a very small ethnic minority group - less than a few thousand in China) in DeHong Prefect, Yunnan Province. We started at about 8pm, this is because they don’t tend to come back from the fields until 6:30-7:00pm, then they make dinner and then they came.

We had bought a bunch of fruit, and daily necessities (such as mosquito coils, toilet paper, soap, toothpaste and toothbrushes, towels, etc.) which we used as prizes and gifts for participating in the training. Everyone was extremely grateful. For the activities the local Centre for Disease Control (CDC) people (who we are teaming up with) and the village health workers had put together an informative discussion, and some games and question/answer periods all with a theme of basic HIV/AIDS prevention. We had some activities for kids and some for adults, and instead of lasting the hour we had expected it to they kept us there for over 2.5 hrs.

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