It's a spring afternoon and the sun is already scorching the soil of southwest China. But in the adobe huts of Sichuan Province's Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, it is still as dark as night.

In a nearly-empty room with just two beds, a desk and a few stools, three children are playing together and eating grilled potatoes. Their clothes and faces are stained with mud, and their only toy is a scruffy gray teddy bear, which the children retrieved from a scrap heap.

"I live just to bring them up," says their 60-year-old grandmother Aniugama, who lives with them in the village of Zhuhe, located in Zhaojue County in Liangshan.

The children are three, five and six years old. Their parents died of AIDS, which is prevalent in the prefecture.

Aniugama was widowed when she was 37. She brought up her two sons and two daughters on her own.

"When I thought to myself that the good days had finally arrived, I found to my surprise that my sons were stealing things from home," she recalls with a sigh. Her children stole clothes and other possessions to sell for drug money.

A screening in 2002 found that all four of her children were infected with HIV. They all died within five years, one after another.

Now, the grandmother and her granddaughters live on a low-income allowance of 408 yuan a month. Sometimes, the neighbors give them potatoes, and local officials have brought them quilts before.

Their house was built by Zhaojue County's health bureau in 2004. One of the house's beams is broken; when it rains, the roof leaks. Aniugama says she is unable to repair the roof on her own.

However, she says her hardest time comes when the children, seeing other children eating candy or wearing new clothes, ask her where their parents have gone and why don't they buy them the same gifts.

"I don't know how to answer," she says, wiping away tears. "Sometimes I can't sleep at night. I look at the children, thinking about who will take care of them after my death. I'm in despair."

On a wall behind the door of Aniugama's hut, there is a wooden photo frame with a picture of a woman posed by a pond. A neighbor says the picture is of Aniugama's daughter. But the face of the woman is covered.

AN EVER-EXPANDING EMERGENCY

Covering some 60,400 square kilometers, the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture boasts a population of 4.73 million people from 14 ethnic groups. Its prefecture seat of Xichang is known as China's primary satellite launching base.

However, the prefecture is also known as one of China's most heavily AIDS-afflicted areas. China's Premier Wen Jiabao visited the area on World AIDS Day last December.

The first case of AIDS was reported in the prefecture in 1995. By the end of last year, the prefecture had registered 21,565 cases.

Most of the infections are contracted by needle-sharing between drug users, according to Yang Wen, vice director of the Sichuan Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Sexual contact is also an important channel, as pre-marital sex is common among the Yi people, Yang says.

As a result, many young and middle-aged people in the region have become infected. After their deaths, their children are left to be taken care of by elderly relatives.

According to Chen Lunan, head of the children's welfare office of the Ministry of Civil Affairs, there are currently about 8,000 orphans in Liangshan. Citing difficulties in conducting surveys, he could not give a specific number for orphans whose parents died from AIDS, but said that these children account for a "large proportion" of Liangshan's orphans.

Ye Daiwei, vice secretary general of the China Red Ribbon Foundation (CRRF), learned from the prefecture government that the number of orphans in Liangshan whose parents died from AIDS is about 3,000, but he estimates that the real number could be higher.

Statistics from the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in 2010 show that in Zhaojue and Butuo, two of Liangshan's worst-hit counties, about 9 percent of children have been affected by the epidemic, while about 4 percent are orphans.

LIFTING ORPHANS UP

To improve the living standards of these orphans, allowances are provided. Each orphan can receive a monthly allowance of 360 yuan from the central government, as well as another 240 yuan from governments at provincial, prefecture and county levels. If there are three orphans in a family, their custodian can receive 1,800 yuan per month. This is a great deal of money in Liangshan, where some farmers' families earn just 2,000 to 3,000 yuan per year.

However, only orphans with a Hukou, or household registration, are eligible to enjoy the subsidy. Many orphans in Liangshan, like Aniugama's three grandchildren, are not covered by the policy as they were not registered after birth.

Several non-government organizations have joined in efforts to help the orphans as well, including the CRRF, which is co-sponsored by the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce and dozens of Chinese companies.

In a class funded by the foundation in Zhaojue, 14-year-old Aremuzhihuo happily chats with her classmates.

"I have my 76-year-old grandmother living with me," says the girl. Although she is more optimistic these days, Aremuzhihuo said she became withdrawn after her parents died from AIDS.

"I didn't want to see other children playing or even walking with their parents," she says. "Some children lost their mothers, some lost their fathers, but I lost both."

It was in this class that Aremuzhihuo met children who were dealing with similar circumstances, like 13-year-old Sunziari.

"In the past, I used to cry over the grave of my mother and talk to her photo," she says. But in her class, students exchange letters to comfort each other.

"Whenever I was feeling depressed, I would write to her," she points at Aremuzhihuo. "She would tell me to forget the past and be confident for the future."

The class, which was established in 2006, has 43 children. Eighteen of them lost parents to HIV, according to 26-year-old Mousewusha, a mathematics teacher in charge of the class. He says that all of the students' fees for the class are waived.

The CRRF plans to fund at least three more similar classes this year in Liangshan, with another 150 to 160 orphans to be enrolled, according to Ye.

However, Ye says he is worried about the youngest orphans, those between 3 and 8 years old.

"The allowances are given to their custodians, such as their uncles and aunts, but who can ensure that the money is actually spent on the children?" he says, adding that there have been cases where the custodians have used the money to purchase drugs.

Ye says the foundation is also planning to set up a "children's village" to raise the youngest orphans until they become old enough to attend school.

He is also worried about children who drop out of school or cannot go on to higher education.

"The Yi children get married very early, usually when they are still teenagers," he says. "In the Zhaojue class, two of the students are already planning on getting married and quitting school."

Ye believes that a way to resolve this problem would be to set up more vocational schools, so that children who are too old to attend primary schools can learn new skills to help them make a living.

A similar program is already being conducted in Liangshan by UNICEF. Since 2007, UNICEF has worked with local civil affairs authorities to train 200 teenagers to sew, drive, cut hair and use computers, among other vocational skills.

Xu Wenqing, a UNICEF officer in charge of the project, says that local civil affairs authorities have also helped the teenagers obtain jobs.

"Perhaps no one can heal the wounds in the hearts of these children, but they have to look ahead and face the future anyway, and that was where we could help," she says.

However, there is definitely more work to do. Although the work being done by UNICEF, CRRF and the local government has been a miracle for many, it seems that no one could help 61-year-old Jikelabi, also from the village of Zhuhe.

Her son married a woman who had been married previously once before. The woman's ex-husband had died of AIDS, and the woman found herself infected with HIV as well.

"When my son heard about the infection, he became so furious that he left home," the elderly woman bitterly recalls.

The couple had a three-year-old boy whose legs were paralyzed and a one-year-old girl by that time. The kids' mother also left home and no one knows her whereabout.

When asked how she will tell the children about their mother, Jikelabi hesitates. "They will not remember their mother when they grow up," she says. But as she says it, her granddaughter falls down on the floor next to her. "Mom," the toddler cries.