By Gisa Hartmann

Last month, I went on my second trip to China for Asia
Catalyst. As we’ve previously discussed in this blog, Asia Catalyst is spending
several years “incubating” or building the internal management skills of
Phoenix, a nonprofit organization of sex workers living with HIV/AIDS. Phoenix
is based in Gejiu, Yunnan, on China’s borders with Vietnam. My main objective
during my two weeks there was to help Phoenix to develop their staff management
system, as well as improve their understanding of budgeting and financial
reporting. We spent an intense two weeks tracking down and discussing every
single receipt for the past two quarters.

One morning, as I was preparing for another day of office
work, I received a call on my cell asking me to come to the office as soon as
possible. The husband of a Phoenix member had died the previous day.

One of the services Phoenix offers is providing funeral
arrangements for their members, and giving emotional support to members, many
of whom are abandoned by their families during times of loss. When we met at
the office, every person was presented with a small red envelope with 1.30
Chinese Yuan (roughly USD 0.19) from the family: a token to show their
appreciation for mourning their loss. We were also given a few grains of rice
to keep in our coat pockets during the funeral, which Phoenix members told me
was a Buddhist funeral custom.

When we arrived at the funeral home, another funeral had just
started. While we waited I learned that the  women of Phoenix expected many more deaths in
2010. This, they told me, is 寡妇年
(guafunian), or the “year of widows”. It occurs
when, due to discrepancies between lunar calendar and solar calendar, the
beginning of spring (February 4th) falls before Chinese spring festival in the
first year, and after Spring festival the next year, so that the whole lunar
year misses its official “beginning of spring”. In these years, many people
believe that husbands die more frequently.

We had to do a lot of sitting around and waiting – the whole
process took four hours – and while we waited, Phoenix’s executive director, Li
Man, explained the cremation process. She said that there are two different
types of cremation: one using gas, and the other oil. Since oil costs half the
price of the faster gas-fuelled cremation, many of the people she serves have
to opt for oil.

Because the burning power of the oil-based flames is not
as strong, the body needs to be turned once or twice throughout the process, a
task she herself has often carried out. This time, the family of the deceased was
available to handle the task, but many Phoenix members do not have this support.
Phoenix normally handles all these tasks: washing and preparation of the body, and
arranging and paying for the cremation.

The funeral home was an arrangement of nondescript
buildings. Apart from the family of the man who had passed away and the group
from Phoenix, there was another small group of friends, many of them husbands
or boyfriends of sex workers in Phoenix. But splits often occur within families
when one person is a sex worker or a drug user: the family of the man who had
died accepted Li Man and the Phoenix women as friends of their lost son, but
openly ignored his wife, a tension that illuminated the important role
grassroots groups play in providing emotional support to bereaved sex workers.

Before the body went into the cremation hall, the family
and friends followed a ritual of burning paper offerings, stuffed animals and
other items to help the deceased on his journey. This was a very emotional
moment for all, and the only moment when emotions were allowed to flow freely. It
was a sharp contrast when the doors to the cremation hall opened to the
terrible stench of burned flesh and hair, and a funeral home worker emerged
carrying a large bucket of bones and ashes and tossed them on the metal table.
The family now had to go through these remains and pick out the bones that were
still intact to go into the urn. Everyone gathered around the table to help
identify suitable pieces for the urn.

After two cannon shots and some firecrackers, the family
and friends sheltered the urn with an umbrella to protect it from sunlight, and
proceeded to the burial grounds.

Attending the funeral was an unforgettable experience,
and one that helped me to understand the importance of the work done by our
partners in China. If mourners are able to pay a higher price, they are spared harsh
tasks such as the preparation of the body or the turning of the burning corpse
during cremation. But if you don’t have a relationship with your family, or money
to pay the costs, who will make arrangements for your funeral? For women at the
front lines of the AIDS epidemic in remote areas of China, there is nowhere to
turn but to a small NGO like Phoenix.

Gisa Hartmann is administrative coordinator of Asia Catalyst.