A group of Brown students want to establish meaningful relationships with AIDS-affected children in China through a new pen pal program.
Christopher Lam '14 and Jingyi Gong '12.5 are spearheading the new program in collaboration with the China AIDS Fund, a nonprofit that organizes Chinese-Americans in the fight against HIV/AIDS in China. By writing letters to AIDS-affected children in the Henan province of China, participants hope to provide emotional support.
"It's a small time commitment, but it can make all the difference in a kid's life," said Jay Xu '14, a volunteer.
The AIDS-affected children face many obstacles. Some are orphaned because they lost their parents to AIDS, and some contracted HIV from their mothers at birth, Lam said. Many children are ostracized because the populations of their home villages are undereducated on the spread of HIV.
The spread of HIV in these villages stemmed from blood donation practices carried out by the Chinese government in the early 1990s. According to a grant proposal from the China AIDS Fund, villagers gave blood in exchange for a sum of money. The blood from multiple donors was then mixed and centrifuged together. The operators of the program took red blood cells from the mixed blood and returned the mixed plasma to donors, infecting hundreds of thousands of donors with HIV across China. Today, poor villages are still suffering from the spread of the disease.
The mentors in the pen pal program write letters to children mostly aged six to 14 who attend one of two China AIDS Fund Children's Centers in Henan. Lam and his brother, Matthew Lam '15, co-founders of the program in the United States, came up with the idea of writing to these AIDS-affected children while working at the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City in 2009. There they met Selina Chan, who works for the China AIDS Fund, and she encouraged them to start a pen pal program in New York, based on one that already existed at Beijing University, the Lams said.
Chan connected them to Huajuan Chen, then a master's student at Columbia, who took on the role of translator and coordinator for the program. The brothers recruited about 10 of their friends in the New York area to begin writing letters. As local high school students, the original members found it easy to have group meetings, but once they entered college, they dispersed geographically and continued writing letters independently. Christopher Lam estimates that about four students outside of Brown continue to write letters.
Gong had participated in a pen pal program at her high school in Shanghai, where she wrote to children at the same centers in Henan. She connected with Christopher Lam when the president of the China AIDS Fund told her that he also attended Brown. The pen pal program, which is new to the University this semester, consists of 14 mentors, four of whom are also letter translators, Gong said. Together, they said they hope to make Brown the first of multiple colleges to have an official program chapter.
U.S. letter-writers first receive background on their Chinese pen pals via social workers who work at the centers, Lam and Gong said. Once letters are written, translators based in the U.S. translate the letter into Mandarin and forward it to the children's centers for the social workers to give to the children. The children's return letters are then scanned and sent to the translators, who give the original and English versions to the mentors, they said.
At the beginning of their interactions with the children, mentors are discouraged from mentioning HIV/AIDS and its related difficulties. They are meant to be a positive influence and can eventually delve into more personal subjects when the relationships grow stronger. These friendships inspire hope for the future, Christopher Lam said. The children "do pursue their dreams."
Chen, who originally oversaw translation for the program, said she could see bonds forming between pen pals as time went on. In the letters, the children did not initially like to talk about their difficult family lives, she said. Instead, they wrote about their schools and the fun times they had at the children's centers after school. But once the pen pals built up more trust, she said they did not worry about judgment like they do at home. She said she believes the program truly provides a successful support system for the children.
Before coming to Brown, Christopher and Matthew Lam went on trips to visit the children's centers to interact with the children they were writing. Christopher Lam said the children get very excited about their pen pals and eagerly wait to receive their letters. He added that during his trip, one child asked, "Could you be my big brother?"
Gong and Christopher Lam attested to the strong bond between pen pals. Christopher Lam said the children "psychologically rely on their pen pals." For this reason, the commitment to being a pen pal should be a long-term one, and writers are required to send at least one letter per month.
So far, recruitment at Brown has been a success. Gong said she was expecting volunteers of mostly Asian descent, but the group is very diverse. The diversity extends to include mentors' concentrations, including computer science, engineering, human biology and East Asian studies. She is also thrilled about having native Chinese speakers available to translate letters.
Xu, whose parents are originally from China, said he felt a desire to support children who share his heritage but live in vastly different social situations. "It's a privilege to have a childhood in a stable family," he said. He was motivated to join after hearing that AIDS-affected children are sometimes banned from school because others fear contracting the disease.
Gong and Christopher Lam are working on fund-raising to provide school supplies and scholarships to help the children afford the costs of eventually attending college. They are also hoping to have trips to Henan in the future so that letter-writers can meet their pen pals.
