Last weekend was very busy for staff of the Division International Studies. Gernot Klantschnig went fundraising the hard way: he ran the Shanghai Half-Marathon (21 km!!) as part of the UNNC team, composed of Annegret Brandau from the Division Sustainable Development, Carsten Tietje from Engineering, Emily Zhang from administration, Julie Miles, the wife of the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, and, last but not least, our Provost himself, Roger Woods.
Carsten Tietje, Annegret Brandau, Gernot Klantschnig at the Shanghai Half-Marathon
Gernot, Annegret, Carsten and Julie had decided to use this race for charity fundraising, a very British tradition. The runners ask friends, family, colleagues and actually everybody interested to donate money for the team and the team will, if they accomplish their task successfully, pass on those donations to a charity of their choice. If the sportsmen fail their task, there are no donations. The donations are thus a motivation for the runners to go all to the end of their race and it has the wonderful side effect of making the lives of other people better. In this case, all runners accomplished the race (Julie Miles in even less than two hours!), cheered and supported by many colleagues and friends from UNNC, among other Sergey Radchenko from our division. All collected donations will now go to COCOA whose mission is to improve the fate of children and babies in China’s orphanage by providing equipment, medicine and trained staff. If you want to support the UNNC team now and now more about the charity run you can still do so at http://www.justgiving.com/UNNC-Team.
At the same time as Gernot was running through the streets of Shanghai, the Head of Division, Catherine Goetze, was mobilizing against AIDS at the UNNC Youth Volunteer’s Association’s “Take AIDS seriously, respect LIFE sincerely” campaign. In the icy wind around Wanda Plaza, the YVA had arranged for a formidable show. The UNNC cheerleader team started the action with their great stunts which attracted a larger public. Followed speeches from representatives of Yinzhou District and of Catherine Goetze, and with games for the public to inform and discuss about AIDS.
"Take AIDS seriously, respect LIFE sincerely" campaign at Wanda Plaza
The relatively low incidence of AIDS and the fact that anti-retroviral therapies are now saving more and more lives should not make people believe that AIDS is a disease only others get, Catherine warned. The disease continues to spread and is touching now also low-risk populations as information and prevention are still not sufficient to make people stop taking risks. AIDS is a sexually transmissible disease and everyone having sexual relationships (and most adults do, don’t they?) can get infected. The full text of the speech can be found here. UNAIDS has just published its annual report on the state of HIV and AIDS in the world with a well-researched section on China: http://www.unaids.org/en/KnowledgeCentre/HIVData/EpiUpdate/EpiUpdArchive/2009/default.asp
While Gernot and Catherine were fighting the cold winds of China’s beginning winter, May Tan-Mullins was off to Bali where she is participating in a meeting of the National Bureau of Asian Research (http://www.nbr.org). Let’s hope that there is as much work as sun, otherwise we would all have to get jealous for such a great conference location…
