Francis Markus, IFRC, Erenhot, China
I am part of a crowd of 2,000 people pressed closely together in the main square of this small border town: me and my colleagues from the Red Cross Society of China, a group of volunteers and railway performers from the Mongolian Red Cross Society, local community members and a diverse line-up of performers on the main stage including ballet dancers, Mongolian classical dancers and a colourful boy band. At first glance, we may look like a disparate group of individuals, but we have all united with a common goal: to promote HIV prevention.
Our colleagues from the Mongolian Red Cross Society just arrived this morning on the overnight train and already the variety show is in full swing. I would love to stay for the whole show but I’m keen to observe the cross-border HIV prevention work that the Chinese and Mongolian Red Cross Societies are doing together on a regular basis. So I slip away with two Mongolian Red Cross Society outreach workers to a little plaza where taxis are constantly bustling in and out. We’ve come to talk to some of the peer educators whom they’ve been working with among the Mongolian sex workers active in this town.
Community conversations
I am lead to a small room. “No photos and no names please,” say my hosts, who come across the border each month from the neighbouring Mongolian province of Dornogobi to continue their HIV prevention work.
In this discreetly darkened ground floor room, with a couple of sofas and a fridge full of cold drinks, we meet a group of five women from Mongolia. They are all university students, or, recent graduates in subjects ranging from computing to English.
They can earn about 1 million tugrugs (about 700 USD) per month doing sex work here, which is many times more than most jobs they could hope to get back home. But, says one girl, “the most difficult thing is being far away from our families.”
Being on the border, they can still call home using the Mongolian cell network, but “we can’t tell our families what we are doing, so we either tell them we are somewhere else in Mongolia or we make up a story about what we are doing in China.”
These women are also peer educators for the Red Cross Societies and they tell me that they enjoy the challenge of spreading their knowledge of HIV prevention among the community of local sex workers, many of whom are from Mongolia (approximately 300).
“We have been getting good cooperation from our colleagues in the Erenhot branch of the Red Cross Society of China,” says Mongolian Red Cross Society outreach worker Dovuuch. “They have specifically been targeting the managers of the sex establishments with their HIV information campaigns.”
Hearing this, I am reminded of the importance of the Red Cross Society of China’s long-term local presence as I know that their work in educating the operators of the sex establishments on HIV is invaluable in creating a supportive environment for the activities of the outreach workers and peer educators.
Community outreach
I spend the rest of my afternoon with my colleagues handing out HIV information in Mongolian and Chinese, along with condoms, in various shopping malls popular with locals and some of the 5,000 Mongolian visitors who come across the border every day. Mongolia is a landlocked country and is cognisant about the need to protect itself from the spread of HIV along the main transit routes from China and Russia. As of the beginning of July, Mongolia had recorded some 74 cases of HIV. Meanwhile, the border town of Erenhot in China has had a total of 11 HIV cases with two people currently living with the virus in the town.
Still much to be done
While our HIV outreach efforts are promising, there are many hard realities that our work will not be able to address. For example, I learned that some sex workers are prevented by their employers from travelling across the border each month to renew their visas because they are in debt, so sometimes they get trafficked to other places.
I end my day thinking that there is still much work to be done. But as we get back to the concert, which is just coming to an end, I feel satisfied knowing that a solid partnership is in place between the Chinese and Mongolian Red Cross Societies. I close the concert knowing that their combined HIV prevention efforts will ultimately help save lives and change minds in this small border town.