Most readers will recognise the Jingpo in this piece as Kachin. This article says that "the incidence of AIDS and drug addiction among Jingpo children in China is estimated at 8%". This strange statement is unintelligible. Incidence is almost impossible to determine in this situation. Is it AIDS or HIV infection? Is it HIV or drugs or both? Are children defined as under 18? Who made the estimation?

Bad reporting on this issue.

[him] moderator

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Dutchman struggles to help Chinese minority
John-Boy Vossen
Radio Netherlands
30 May 2012

Dutchman Anton Lustig and his Chinese wife Li Yang are trying to build a cultural centre for the Jingpo ethnic minority in the south-western province of Yunnan. The project has been beset with problems.

“Sometimes it seems like a fool’s errand” shrugs sinologist Anton Lustig, “but we’ll survive. We just have to get through this crisis.”

Construction of the cultural centre for the Jingpo has been plagued by money problems. In the past year Lustig and his wife have spent nearly all their savings trying to realise their dream of a goodwill centre for exhibitions and activities in the village of Yingpan. They also want provide accommodation for volunteers, researchers and other guests interested in the Jingpo.

Banyan roots
The Jingpo are an ethnic minority with their own language, crafts, martial arts and herbal lore. Their culture is originally animist and, though little of that remains, they still have a great deal of respect for the enormous banyan trees which give the Prop Roots project its name.
Dr Lustig is one of the few if not the only foreigner to speak the main Jingpo language, Zaiwa, and he wrote the authoritative textbook on the language. He has also visited one of the remaining local shamans and collected his stories so he can tell them to the village children.

Construction of the cultural centre in southwest China, near the Burmese border, faced problems from day one. As Anton Lustig recounts: “It was difficult to find workmen since the Chinese New Year was about to start and they all had to help harvesting the sugar beet.”

More Trouble
Not only that, but he had not realised that the cost of building materials and manpower would be considerably higher in remote parts of the country than it is in the cities. To add to the confusion, the original Chinese contractor pocketed 40 percent of the money himself. As a result the materials arrived late or not at all and the building workers had to wait a long time to get paid or were not paid at all.

“When we uncovered the embezzling, we immediately hired a new contractor and from then on the project went ahead according to plan.”

Crowdfunding
In two weeks time, however, their savings will be exhausted. They have managed to collect around 2,000 euros from their friends but that does not go a long way towards the nearly 40,000 euros they still require. An attempt at crowdfunding, collecting money through a website, was not a success. So far not a single euro has been donated through the 4just1.com website. Although they are still trying to drum up funds through their network, it looks as though they will be forced to resort to a bank loan.

“What do the Jingpo think of it? That’s hard to say. We have tried to explain the project to some villagers but they just say that things are fine as they are. Social problems caused by drugs and AIDS are just brushed under the carpet.”

Empowerment
There are just under a million Jingpo. Around 130,000 live inside China, the rest are in Burma which is also the source of the opium and heroin which are trafficked across the border. The incidence of AIDS and drug addiction among Jingpo children in China is estimated at 8 percent. Prostitution is also widespread.

The slogan of Prop Roots is: 'Empowering Jingpo children with their own culture, their own creativity'.

“Once we have our centre we will be able to provide the children with better education on a regular basis. It will make them more assertive, more creative and better able to communicate, as well as giving them more self-confidence and a sense of cultural identity. This will protect the children from the listlessness which often affects them at a later age and makes them susceptible to the dangers of drug use and AIDS. This approach works better than simply confronting the local people with their problems. But the first thing is to get the centre built.”

http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/dutchman-struggles-help-chinese-minority