– Marco Carvalho
They work with women at risk, provides education to the orphans of HIV-AIDS, takes care of leprosy and HIV-affected patients and are now starting to look at such aspects as the environment and environmental awareness. Founded 32 years ago by Father Luis Ruiz, Casa Ricci Social Service lends it support to more than four thousand people in Mainland China. The mission that the Spanish Jesuit charged himself with more than three decades ago is carried on today by Fernando Azpiroz. The Argentinian is responsible for a team of 75 workers and volunteers and a network of nearly two dozens of centers and communities that cost more that one million dollars to run every year. Money is an issue, Father Azpiroz recognizes, but the work made in Mainland China by Casa Ricci with “the poorest of the poor” is priceless.
Is leprosy still a big thing in China? We tend to look as leprosy as something of the past, while HIV is still a very recent disease.
It depends, if you put the question as an absolute question or as comparative one. Comparatively speaking, it is not a problem anymore. The disease is under control. Very few new cases are reported every year, although there are still cases. Leprosy was not eradicated. It is under control. The problem is … if you are affected by leprosy, you will face big problems. Maybe, as a whole, the figures are not big, but this group of people still faces prejudice. Some of them, they are already cured, but they suffered big disabilities because of the disease and they have to live with that. Some of them have to do so without their families, because they abandoned them.
Accordingly to statistics there are about 300,000 people affected by leprosy in China and the number of new cases is small, but we can still find new cases. In this group of people, some don’t have any family, others are elderly and many others have big disabilities and, therefore, they face discrimination. For those affected, this is a big issue. In my opinion, these are the lowest of the low in China. They are the ones in the worst situation. This is not a problem if we look at it from China’s point of view, but in terms of how it affects their human lives, it is easily a problem. It is a problem that needs to be addressed in many different ways. The Government, of course, plays its own role, but these people deserve to be taken care of in a more personal way.
About HIV … You were mentioning you worked in Hunan province. Wasn’t that the province where we had all those HIV cases related to blood transfusions …
That’s Henan. We are working in Hunan. In Hunan, the problem was more of a local nature. We are talking about an area in which there were a lot of people that were addicted to drugs, so there was a rise in the number of people with HIV-AIDS. It’s a very small place and this people became sick and they were dying. At that time, the multi-drug therapy, the ART cocktail (Anti-Retroviral Drug Therapy) was just starting, so this people were dying and this was a big issue for the community. The community was small; the number of people in this situation was big. It was not a big problem overall, but it was a huge one for the community. That’s how we started: taking care of people that were dying because of HIV-AIDS. After them, we received their children. But this is not a case as big as in Henan.
In an overall sense, do you have an idea about the number of people that you have helped and with whom you work with everyday?
Altogether? If you consider hospitals, the work we do with women at risk, the direct work with leprosy affected people and their children, we are talking about 4,000 people, more or less. Of course, these are just the ones we help directly. Then you have the families and all the people that are indirectly affected by our work.
And the caregivers? How many? You were saying that you work mainly with sisters on a volunteer basis.
Most of them. Now we are combining different approaches to the work we do on a daily basis in these communities. We call them communities of solidarity, because they are services, but there’s also a common life, they live together. We have about 60 volunteers, which are Sisters, most of them. And then we have about 15 or 16 workers who are coordinating these different efforts. In some places, some of these workers have started to take the place of the Sisters. They are living in those places also, especially places where our approach is more a community approach instead of only a center. We have staff living in one center there with the mission to reach the community. There’s a new method at work. All together, I would say that we have about 70 to 75 persons working with us, including staff and the Sisters. There are also all the people supporting us, the benefactors and this would be enough to add another 2,000 people who are continuously behind us, supporting us.
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