Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
Basic information
Luxi City is located in the west part of Yunnan Province between 98°01′ and 98°44′ east longitude and between 24°05′ and 24°39′ north latitude. It is 71 km long (west to east) and 62 km wide (north to south) and has a total area of 2987 square km, of which 26% is valley area and 76% is mountain area. The county borders with Burma on a bordering line as long as 68.23 km.
The total population of the city is 370669, of which 75396 is women and 28756 is children under 7 years old. Ethnically Han people take up 50.65%, Dai people 35.28%, Jingpo 7.86%, Lisu 1.08%, De’ang 2.6%, and others 2.53%. De’ang is among the smallest ethnic groups in China and is mainly inhabited in villages in Santanshan Township.
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Saturday, January 10th, 2009
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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Tuesday, January 6th, 2009
The Mangshi Town, Da-wan Village being one of its villages, is the largest town in Luxi County and even in Dehong Prefecture, enjoying an area of 427.5 square kilometres and having a total population of 140,000, the majority of whom are Dai and Han, intermingled by a small number of Jingpo and De’Ang.
The Dai people living in Myanmar have a different name of Shan and live mainly in the Shan State. In Luxi County, Dehong Prefecture, Dai people are a major ethnic minority group, who live in fertile valley areas such as Mangshi Town, Fengping Town, Zhefang Town and Xuangang Township where crops grow well and transportation is convenient. Therefore, Dai people are relatively rich compared with other ethnic minority groups, even richer than most of the Han people living on farms.
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