The Honorable Chief Justice, Chairman and Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, fellow Awardees and dear friends.
A seven-year-old girl I know named Fang Fang asked her dying mother, "Mom, why don't you sell me? If you sold me, you would have money to buy medicine." What she did not know was that both her parents were dying of AIDS from selling their blood. They died recently, leaving Fang Fang and her younger sister behind. Her sister has since been diagnosed HIV-positive. Having lost both parents to AIDS, Fang Fang will soon lose her only sibling to the virus, becoming the only survivor in her family.
According to the China News Agency, there are 76,000 AIDS orphans like Fang Fang on the mainland, and the number will increase to 260,000 by 2010. UNICEF's estimates are higher: that there are half a million children in China today who have been orphaned by the disease, are HIV-positive or are living in households with at least one HIV-positive parent.
Due to unsanitary collection practices in the 1990s, many poor peasants contracted HIV while selling blood to earn extra income. In some villages today, more than 40 percent of adults have either died of AIDS or are HIV-positive. Tens of thousands of orphans have been left behind. Most do not have HIV themselves. If we do not help them now, they will grow up uneducated and vulnerable, becoming a large force for social instability for decades to come.
Having watched in horror the destruction of the middle generation, I started a programme to help AIDS-impacted children by sponsoring their education and providing psycho-social support and vocational training. The Chi Heng Foundation does not build orphanages, and we do not operate foster care. Instead we empower local communities so that children can grow up with their grandparents and relatives. We help them to go back to school with children not affected by AIDS. We also try to cut out middlemen by paying school fees directly to schools and to the students we serve. Taking a pragmatic, non-confrontational approach, we have grown to become the largest non-government effort focused on helping youngsters affected by AIDS in China, serving more than 4,000 children.
Since AIDS emerged twenty-five years ago, it has killed more than twenty million people worldwide. Another forty-five million people are living with HIV. While most casualties have been in sub-Saharan Africa, many experts predict Asia will be next. You may think Asia still has a long time to respond. However, from an epidemiological perspective, once we have passed a threshold, the virus will spread rapidly. We do not have time to be complacent. Even a moderate 3 percent infection rate in just two Asian countries, China and India, could translate into seventy million new infections, resulting in unbearable costs in medical care and social instability-and millions of orphans.
On learning of the disastrous impact of AIDS in Africa, many people in the developed world said, "Gee, I wish I had known. We could have done something." In the case of Asia, we have no excuse for saying such a thing-because we do know AIDS is coming. We also have a rapidly closing window of opportunity to prevent more from being infected and do something about children affected by the virus. Ten years from now, would we rather say to each other "Gee, I wish I had done something," or "Gee, I am proud that I have done something?"
I would like to thank my good friend and mentor, Dr. Gao Yao Jie, who came all the way from China to show her support. Her integrity, her courage to speak the truth and her compassion to help AIDS-impacted people are my inspiration, motivating me to go on.
Last but not least, I am extremely grateful to the Ramon Magsaysay Award selection committee for giving me this prestigious award, which is not only a recognition of our work, but also a statement of the importance of AIDS.
