Getting up at 6:00 AM, Zhihuo, a 14-year-old girl from the Chinese Yi ethnic minority, started her first day as a fifth grader by feeding the only pig in her home, where she lives with her 76-year-old grandmother.

Brought up hand-to-mouth by her grandmother, the girl lost her parents several months after her birth in Zhaojue, a state-level poverty-stricken county in Yi Autonomous Prefecture of Liangshan in southwestern Sichuan Province.

In Zhihuo's class are 41 Yi students who are all believed to have lost one or both parents to AIDS.

Most students in the class have been raised by their grandparents, while several lucky ones could also count on their uncles and aunts, said Mouse Wusha, who began tutoring the children right after he graduated from college in August 2006.

The class, established by the prefecture's women and children development center at Sikai Central School of Zhaojue in 2006, started accepting funding from the China Red Ribbon Foundation, a national non-government organization dedicated to the prevention and control of AIDS, in September 2009.

AIDS-shadowed county

As China's largest Yi community, Liangshan was also one of the areas worst plagued by AIDS in China.

Since the first HIV-positive case was found among drug users sent back from Yunnan province in 1995, Liangshan had reported 18,003 cases of AIDS by the end of 2009, accounting for 60 percent of Sichuan's total, with 5,530 new cases last year alone, said Yang Zhaobo, deputy head of the prefectural government.

"Many people in Liangshan who contracted AIDS are intravenous drug users. Due to poor medical conditions, they wouldn't spontaneously take tests or seek medications, and finally died of various complications of the disease," said Ye Dawei, vice-secretary of the foundation.

The incurable disease left a large number of children orphaned in Liangshan, though no authoritative figures have been released.

Workers with the foundation once visited some families of AIDS-orphaned children in Zhaojue, Ye said. "They are living a really hard life. In an extremely poor family, I saw that those jars used to contain rice and flour were empty. They ate meat about once a month."

Malnutrition was threatening the physical conditions of the students, who were significantly shorter than other children their age.

"The AIDS orphans that our sponsorship couldn't reach were in worse health conditions," Ye added.

The foundation provided every student in the class with 150 yuan (about US$22) per month, so food and uniforms would no longer be barriers to schooling.

But the subsidy was apparently insufficient to support the whole family or enable them to develop outside interests.

"I still remember one night last year when Zhihuo and her grandmother had run out of food. The girl knelt in a field at 10:00 PM to dig for potatoes, took them back home alone and cooked them for her grandmother," Wusha recalled.

Also, most students in the class had to do household and farm chores in their leisure time to help the family make ends meet. "We simply can't afford to play," said 12-year-old Muniu.

Considering that the county' s government had a tight budget, it couldn't help much, Ye said.