Word: henan
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They line the dusty roads outside the tiny villages of China's Henan province, several hours' drive from Beijing--mounds of dirt funneled into crudely shaped cones, like a phalanx of earthen bamboo hats. To the uninitiated, they look like a clever new way of turning over fields--an agricultural innovation, perhaps, meant to increase crop yields. But the locals know the truth. Buried under the pyramids, which now number in the thousands, are their mothers and fathers, brothers, sisters and cousins, all victims of AIDS. Like silent sentries, the dirt graves are a testament to China's worst-kept...
...HENAN PROVINCE...
...Foundation in Hong Kong, is one of the few outsiders who has penetrated the state-imposed isolation of the so-called AIDS villages in central China. He is all too familiar with the plight of small children orphaned by the disease. On a recent visit to a village in Henan, he watched an 8-year-old boy taking his father out for a walk. The boy was pushing his father along in a creaky wooden cart. The man was dying of AIDS and had been confined to his bed for weeks, too weak to walk. His son suggested the cart...
...heavily affected provinces like Henan, Hebei and Shaanxi, an entire generation is vanishing in the shadow of AIDS. In family after family, mothers and fathers are dying, leaving as many as 200,000 children in Henan alone either parentless or in the care of aging grandparents. Ho and his colleagues were the first foreign group officially allowed to visit one of its villages, Wenlou. At the local hospital, only two doctors care for more than 1,000 HIV-positive patients, and they were trained not by the Chinese health system but by one of Ho's colleagues based in China...
...paid donors for their plasma. It was a program intended to benefit all Chinese--the poor by giving them a way to supplement their income, and the rest of China by replenishing the national blood banks' dangerously low stocks. "It was like a poverty-relief program," says a Henan resident who gave plasma in 1993 and became infected. Through campaigns in the villages and schools, the government encouraged rural farmers and factory workers to sell their plasma for 40 yuan ($5). The good intentions backfired when "bloodheads," as some of the unofficial blood collectors came to be known, found...