I first entered East Lake in early 2001 as I would enter several other rural Chinese villages that year: smuggled in deep at night, under a tarpaulin in the back of a bicycle cart normally used to carry chickens. As a New York Times reporter based in Beijing, I had come to central China to interview poor farmers who were suffering and dying in a devastating epidemic that few people there had a name for or understood. But I knew this disease well. Before becoming a journalist, I had trained as a physician at the height of New York City's AIDS epidemic, between 1986 and 1989, when effective drugs were not available yet and patients died, painfully, often within weeks of their diagnoses. In the United States, AIDS was - still is - primarily an urban disease. The mantra of my medical training was the list of groups at highest risk of catching the virus: gay men, hemophiliacs, IV-drug users, sex workers. So when Gao Yaojie, M.D., a retired gynecologist, first told me that HIV/AIDS was rampant in certain villages in rural China, I was riveted but also deeply skeptical. What on earth was AIDS doing there? Related: Top Life-Saving Tests As I was hustled from the back of the bicycle cart into a dirt-floored shack overflowing with dozens of villagers in ragged clothes, my skepticism quickly dissolved: One by one, they pulled up their shirts and opened their mouths to reveal a dizzying assortment of infections. I touched foreheads roaring with fever, looked at oozing rashes, and felt lymph nodes so swollen they nearly jumped through the skin. I saw tongues blanketed with white carpets of yeast and skin pocked by the tiny transparent blisters of shingles. When I was a young doctor, before rapid HIV tests became available, we diagnosed AIDS by tallying whether new patients had a convincing combination of typical HIV-related complaints or infections. That night I had little doubt: Every one of these farmers had it. I spent much of the next year and a half reporting and writing a series of articles on villages like East Lake, where more than a third of the adult population was infected - the result of unsanitary blood-collection practices at rural health centers where villagers sold blood to earn a little much-needed cash. Back then, the Chinese government regarded the existence of the disease in these villages as an embarrassing secret and provided no help to the afflicted. The suffering was terrible, the stories heartbreaking: I saw farmers abandon their fields and die miserable deaths without any medicine or treatment. Fresh graves multiplied with each subsequent visit - a dramatic sight across the Chinese countryside, because the dead are buried vertically, half above ground level, creating a tower of dirt for each body. I watched plump 8-year-olds drop out of school to care for ailing parents, gradually turn hungry and skeletal, and ultimately become orphans. I still cry when I look at my pictures of the white-robed funeral marches and the lonely, emaciated children. There is an iconic photo, taken in East Lake at the height of its AIDS epidemic, that ran in a number of newspapers and magazines: It shows Dr. Gao surrounded by six village children who had all lost one or both parents, though they themselves were not infected. They sit on coarse wooden chairs, their poverty evident from their cloth shoes and tattered jackets - a paltry defense against the cold in an empty, dirt-floored room with no windowpanes. What's most striking is that not one of them looks at the camera, and there is no hint of childish mischief or mirth. They were, by then, hollowed-out remnants of children, each staring vacantly at the floor or into the distance. On my last visit to East Lake in late 2002, one of the girls in the photo, Ling,* then 14, described her plight to me stoically: The family home had decayed and collapsed as her parents' health deteriorated, so she and a younger brother were living together in a shack lit by a candle. They were no longer in school because they couldn't pay the fees, and neighbors gave them rice and salt to eat. "I'm responsible for my brother, who is 10," Ling said. "Nobody among my relatives can help. My dad had brothers, but one is dead and the others are sick, too. My biggest difficulty is, I have no future." Related: 13 Superfoods to Keep You Young
I did what I could, but my hopes for the future of my friends in these villages were abysmally low: Coloring books and Tylenol were no match for a disease that was properly treated with $10,000-a-year antiretroviral drug regimens. I fully expected that most of the parents would die, and that their orphaned children would end up as illiterate street kids. Once-vibrant farming communities like East Lake, I thought, would simply be abandoned and vanish. I couldn't bear to think about it as I left China for good in summer 2003, focused more on a return to New York City that felt long overdue after six years abroad. I had a new assignment waiting, and I was eager to get my own kids- who had spent more than half their young lives in Beijing- back to school in the States. They had absorbed the 50th anniversary of the Chinese Communist revolution in Tiananmen Square, but did not know the U.S. national anthem. Back home, I occasionally would get snippets of information through an informal grapevine of doctors, journalists, and activists based in China (direct contact was impossible due to the lack of phones and to language barriers). Some people with HIV died; relatives took in some kids, while others were given new names and sent secretly to live with families in other provinces. But there was positive news, too. The Chinese government shut down the blood-selling operations and started making and distributing effective AIDS drugs. The Clinton Foundation began providing sick kids with top-notch antiviral medicine. Dr. Gao received prestigious global human rights awards for her role in uncovering the presence of AIDS in rural China. Closest to my heart, a Hong Kong - American named Chung To quit his job as a banker and started the Chi Heng AIDS Orphans Program. The mission: to help children who had at least one parent with HIV stay in school through college- paying fees (required even by public elementary schools in China), providing extra food for families during lean harvests, and arranging first jobs. Related: One Mom's Quest to Save Her Twins As time passed, my mind sometimes drifted to the villagers with a mix of curiosity, guilt, and sadness. As I watched my own children's progress through school- sitting in on debate tournaments, tennis matches, and school musicals like Annie- I occasionally thought of the girl with tuberculosis and the little boy who might have been my kids' adoptive brother and wondered what had become of them.
We grappled with how to plan a route given that many East Lake families had been fragmented and scattered. Chung To offered a suggestion: that we try to catch up with the six children shown in the photo with Dr. Gao and what remained of their families. Amazingly, he knew the whereabouts of most of them. So it was that on a steamy day last August, Andrew and I found ourselves in the backseat of a white van with tinted windows, heading for East Lake. I was flooded with memories as we passed landmarks in broad daylight that I had previously spied from my hiding place in the back of the chicken cart: There was the hut the police had used as a checkpoint to keep strangers out of the "AIDS village." And there was the hospital that had served as the backdrop for the careless blood collection - a white-tile building that was far more substantial than I had ever imagined. Related: How to Prevent Medical Errors As luck would have it, two of the sextet we'd hoped to find were sitting right in front of us, having hitched a ride back to their hometown, or laojia. Though most rural Chinese today leave their villages to study and work, they remain connected to their ancestral homes. Visits are limited by the fact that transportation in central China's rural regions still consists mostly of slow, rickety old buses. But just as in New York City, there's a cell phone in every college student's pocket. So when texts spread that our van would be making the six-hour drive to East Lake from the nearest big city, both girls came along as passengers. An,* a pretty, gregarious 23-year-old with a degree in early childhood education, was paying a visit to her mother, who'd survived the epidemic: She'd clung to life just long enough to see the day when proper AIDS treatment arrived in East Lake. An's father had already died. "I remember he had terrible pain in the stomach and the head, and how we sold everything - the chairs, the bed, the table - to buy shots of morphine," she said. An only child, she dropped out of school to care for her ill parents; in any case, there was no money to pay for school fees, which could run from $40 a term for primary school to $4,000 for university - a king's ransom for families that even today typically earn only $400 to $500 a year. Shaped by that experience, An now works for the Orphans Program in another province as resident director in a tidy group home for 10 young orphans, ages 6 to 17, who have AIDS. Ten years ago, these kids would have died; now they have An as a surrogate mom/older sister. (Chinese orphanages still won't take in children who are HIV-infected.) Twice a day she watches as the children swallow antiretroviral medication kept in a small refrigerator. She has created a home filled with schoolwork, singing, and sports - not disease. We had visited earlier in the week, when the house was holding a raucous birthday party featuring cake, hats, and games for a pudgy 10-year-old prankster named Bai Bai.* The next day, she joined us in the van, returning to East Lake in order to plan her upcoming wedding. Seated in the van next to An was Ren,* a fashionable 19-year-old university student in marketing, whose quiet ways, pale skin, and large eyes made her seem doll-like. For her the return to East Lake - only her second visit home, and her first in five years - was more emotionally fraught. As a bright, sensitive 9-year-old, she had been whisked away to live with a foster family in another province after both her parents died of AIDS. Ren had been forced to give up her friends, her home, even her name. She'd left behind her sister, then a toddler, who was raised by an uncle and his wife. Related: How Facebook Saved A Life The van came to a halt in front of a cluster of villagers - simple farmers, holding hands with children decked out in their best clothes - who had been awaiting the arrival of the Chi Heng team. As we clambered out into the heat carrying gifts of boxed cakes and tins of oil, a stick-thin, buoyant woman about my age ran over, took my arm, and gave me a big smile. "Ni huilai le!" she said. "You came back!" *Names have been changed to protect privacy, as have some faces in photos.To find out more about the author's reunion, read the rest of this story. |
Thursday, April 04, 2013
A Journalist Reunites with the AIDS Orphans She Covered by Elisabeth Rosenthal
Where in the world is it safe to travel?
By Dylan Stableford, Yahoo! News Reports of brutal rapes of foreign tourists in India and Brazil in recent months have rocked the international travel industry. According to data cited by The Atlantic, visitors to India have dropped 25 percent since December's fatal gang-rape of a young woman on a bus in the capital of New Delhi, and 35 percent among female travelers. And that data was compiled before March 16, when a Swiss woman who was touring the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh by bicycle with her husband was gang-raped by a group of eight men. In Madhya Pradesh, there are nine reported rapes every day, according to the Washington Post. In Brazil, where an American tourist was raped by three men over the course of six hours on Monday, reports of rapes there have risen 150 percent since 2009, The Atlantic reported. Not surprisingly, Brazil and India are among the most dangerous places to travel, according to an interactive map produced by Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs. But they're not the most dangerous: North Korea, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Mali, Niger, Sudan, South Sudan, Central African Republic and Somalia are where would-be tourists are warned to "avoid all travel." For other countries, like Libya, visitors are cautioned to "avoid non-essential travel." The color-coded danger map also includes region- and time-specific warnings. In Pakistan, tourists are told to avoid:
In Mexico, those "required to travel to Monterrey, in the state of Nuevo León, should avoid movement after dark and stay within the suburb of San Pedro Garza García." So where, exactly, is it safe to travel? Australia, Botswana, Canada, Chile, most of Europe, Greenland, Iceland, New Zealand, Malaysia, South Korea, the United States and Uruguay, according to the agency. "No matter where in the world you intend to travel," the department's website advises, "make sure you check the travel advice and advisories page twice: once when you are planning your trip, and again shortly before you leave. ... The decision to travel is the sole responsibility of the individual." |
Strange Sleep Disorder Makes People See 'Demons'
By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer When filmmaker Carla MacKinnon started waking up several times a week unable to move, with the sense that a disturbing presence was in the room with her, she didn't call up her local ghost hunter. She got researching. Now, that research is becoming a short film and multiplatform art project exploring the strange and spooky phenomenon of sleep paralysis. The film, supported by the Wellcome Trust and set to screen at the Royal College of Arts in London, will debut in May. Sleep paralysis happens when people become conscious while their muscles remain in the ultra-relaxed state that prevents them from acting out their dreams. The experience can be quite terrifying, with many people hallucinating a malevolent presence nearby, or even an attacker suffocating them. Surveys put the number of sleep paralysis sufferers between about 5 percent and 60 percent of the population. "I was getting quite a lot of sleep paralysis over the summer, quite frequently, and I became quite interested in what was happening, what medically or scientifically, it was all about," MacKinnon said. [Top 10 Spooky Sleep Disorders] Her questions led her to talk with psychologists and scientists, as well as to people who experience the phenomenon. Myths and legends about sleep paralysis persist all over the globe, from the incubus and succubus (male and female demons, respectively) of European tales to a pink dolphin-turned-nighttime seducer in Brazil. Some of the stories MacKinnon uncovered reveal why these myths are so chilling. Sleep stories One man told her about his frequent sleep paralysis episodes, during which he'd experience extremely realistic hallucinations of a young child, skipping around the bed and singing nursery rhymes. Sometimes, the child would sit on his pillow and talk to him. One night, the tot asked the man a personal question. When he refused to answer, the child transformed into a "horrendous demon," MacKinnon said. For another man, who had the sleep disorder narcolepsy (which can make sleep paralysis more common), his dream world clashed with the real world in a horrifying way. His sleep paralysis episodes typically included hallucinations that someone else was in his house or his room — he'd hear voices or banging around. One night, he awoke in a paralyzed state and saw a figure in his room as usual. [See MacKinnon's Artistic Images of Sleep Paralysis] "He suddenly realizes something is different," MacKinnon said. "He suddenly realizes that he is in sleep paralysis, and his eyes are open, but the person who is in the room is in his room in real life." The figure was no dream demon, but an actual burglar. Myths and science of sleep paralysis Sleep paralysis experiences are almost certainly behind the myths of the incubus and succubus, demons thought have sex with unsuspecting humans in their sleep. In many cases, MacKinnon said, the science of sleep paralysis explains these myths. The feeling of suffocating or someone pushing down on the chest that often occurs during sleep paralysis may be a result of the automatic breathing pattern people fall into during sleep. When they become conscious while still in this breathing pattern, people may try to bring their breathing under voluntary control, leading to the feeling of suffocating. Add to that the hallucinations that seem to seep in from the dream world, and it's no surprise that interpretations lend themselves to demons, ghosts or even alien abduction, MacKinnon said. What's more, MacKinnon said, sleep paralysis is more likely when your sleep is disrupted in some way — perhaps because you've been traveling, you're too hot or too cold, or you're sleeping in an unfamiliar or spooky place. Those tendencies may make it more likely that a person will experience sleep paralysis when already vulnerable to thoughts of ghosts and ghouls. "It's interesting seeing how these scientific narratives and the more psychoanalytical or psychological narratives can support each other rather than conflict," MacKinnon said. Since working on the project, MacKinnon has been able to bring her own sleep paralysis episodes under control — or at least learned to calm herself during them. The trick, she said, is to use episodes like a form of research, by paying attention to details like how her hands feel and what position she's in. This sort of mindfulness tends to make scary hallucinations blink away, she said. "Rationalizing it is incredibly counterintuitive," she said. "It took me a really long time to stop believing that it was real, because it feels so incredibly real." |
J. Congdon gets his money back because of Jack Reacher trailer
Trailers are supposed to give moviegoers a taste of the full film. And to a large extent, they do the job. Sure, there are exceptions. Sometimes a comedy puts all the good jokes in the trailer or an explosion gets cut from an action film. Most of the time, moviegoers don't care. Most of the time. One New Zealand man, identified as J. Congdon, takes his explosions very seriously. The man was apparently so distressed by the fact that the 2012 Tom Cruise thriller "Jack Reacher" did not include an explosion that was featured in the trailer, he complained to his country's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The complaint from the movie buff referred to the missing explosion "where the whole cliff comes down" as "the defining part of the ad that made me really want to go see the movie... aside from having Tom Cruise in it." Paramount defended itself, citing a "usual and longstanding practice in the film industry that cinema trailers and television advertisements" are made long before the film receives its final edit. "Thus," Paramount continued, "despite our best intentions, it is always possible that certain scenes appearing in an advertisement or trailer may not appear in the final version of a film." Nevertheless, Paramount has given the disappointed moviegoer his money back. According to the New Zealand Herald, the ASA now considers the complaint settled. Just wait until the complaints about "Cocktail" come rolling in. The missing cliff explosion occurs at around 1:18 in the trailer: |
Wednesday, April 03, 2013
Harga SIM Card di Myanmar Rp 2 juta
|