Funding for Australian-Chinese Joint AIDS Peer Education Program The focus of the fund raising efforts in 1998-9 was the Australian-Chinese Joint AIDS Peer Education Project. Senior medical students are trained and then sent out to educate their junior peers about AIDS, STDs, and safer sex. This style of education of youth and for youth replaces the traditionally teacher-centered teaching format and is proving successful in universities in Shanghai and Beijing. The funds raised by Interact will be used for very practical purposes, to provide lunches and taxi fares for the peer educators as they work with different universities.
Interact members raised rmb 11,500 by organizing two activities: a lunchtime free-throw contest in March and a buy-a-friend assembly in April. The funds were presented to Dr. Gao Yuan, director of the project, in June. Dr. Gao Yuan issued a press release for the occasion, bringing reporters and camera crews to ISB to witness the presentation. He emphasized to the reporters that he believed this was the first time ever in China that high school students had raised money for fighting AIDS. He expressed hope that the efforts of ISB students will encourage others to become involved in AIDS education and AIDS prevention. Later he sent to Interact translations of the coverage in The People’s Daily, Beijing Evening News, Beijing Youth Daily, The Service Weekly, and Shopping Guide.
Interact members present their "cheque" for RMB 11,500 to a peer educator in the Australian-Chinese Joint AIDS Peer Education Program. Also posing with the group is a member of the press who attended the ceremony.
Song Tang Hospice Interact Students have visited the Song Tang Hospice for several years. What do high school students do at Song Tang, especially if they don’t speak Mandarin? They might sing or dance in the courtyard, sometimes in response to a song or a speech from the residents themselves; they hold the hands of the bedridden, admire family photographs, bring flowers. In November 1999, students painted one of the rooms with an array of flowers, birds, and greenery — whatever was requested by the three ladies in the room, including a rabbit by the bed of Liu Zhi Fong, age 82. This painting project was selected to be featured on the Jane Goodall Institute’s Roots & Shoots display panels at conferences and presentations throughout the United States.
Those students who do not speak Mandarin learn about the residents’ families as well as tell aobut themselves, sometimes by showing their own family photographs. As Dr. Li Wei, the founder of the hospice, suggests, they must remember that they bring the outside world into the hospice, which should be a world of laughter, joy, and love. If a resident is unable to speak, students communicate in writing. Interact students have visited the Song Tang Hospice for several years. These photos are from the Song Tang Hospice painting project in 1998-99:
Sikasso, Mali, West Africa Interact became interested in this project through an ISB teacher, Mr. Michael Schneller, whose daughter Rachael was a Peace Corps volunteer in Sikasso. ISB students raised USD $600, which Mr. Schneller matched. Some of the amount ($400) was used to purchase oil lamps, lamp fuel, and study tables for adult literacy classes in Sikasso, and the rest was used to set up a scholarship fund for Karidia Traore at the Nurse’s School in Sikasso.
In August 1998, Interact received a letter from Karidia Traore, an excerpt of which is seen here in translation: