TAG = "sex workers"

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Read about this De’Ang village in Santaishan Township

Photos from our HIV/AIDS prevention training session in a remote De’Ang village in Santaishan Township.

There are 3 villages in the Santaishan area. All three are farming villages:

Han Chinese village Jingpo village De’ang village

The Jinghpaw and De’ang are ethnic minority groups. Populations of both of these ethnic groups also live in Myanmar (Burma), in larger numbers than the groups found in China. The Han Chinese have the highest living standards of the three groups, so there are less cultural roadblocks to development for them.

Photos & video from this training:

De’Ang Village Training Slideshow Buying Fruits for De’Ang Village Training HIV/AIDS Training by a Single Lightbulb De’ang Village Statistics

The De’Ang ethnic group in Yunnan Province, near the Myanmar border, is the smallest of ethnic minority groups in this part of China. Large numbers of De’ang can be found in Myanmar (Burma) but only small numbers of them remain in China. They have not mixed with the local Han Chinese population and way of life in modern China as well as other ethnic minority groups have.

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

The CDC people were rather busy in this month with the Beijing programme. They said they had no time for programme activities in villages. So she asked the CDC people to invite some sex workers to the CENTRE in the afternoon of October 27 in order to familiarize herself with the workings of the CENTRE and to meet some of the women who used this resource.. Peer counseling is one of the functions that the CENTRE provides.

11 girls and women between 20 and 50 years old came. Various personal accounts were given concerning why these women worked as sex workers. A woman aged around 45 confided that she had tried various jobs after getting divorced, but that income far enough from supporting her two children, one studying at a university, the other at a senior high, so she chose to do sex work, which enables her to earn 7 times more than what she did before. Financial difficulties and lack of education were a common thread among the various women’s personal accounts.

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

On september 19-20 we went to see how the CENTRE was running. It turned out to be working fine. Some sex workers came by and inquired about some problems. We interviewed them and some did not mind talking about their life.

During the talking, Claire and two CDC workers handed out a questionaire, checking how much the street sex workers knew about STD’s and HIV/AIDS and what to do to help them protect themselves, their customers and their family members. When the girls and women were not certain, we would provided them with information and discussed the various questions/comments/concerns that arose.

In the evening of September 19, Our team members (Claire and the 7 CDC people) took the questionaire and went interviewing sex works at different venues (massage lounges, KTV-Karaoke, night clubs), trying to figure out how much knowledge they had on HIV/AIDS and other STDs.

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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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