The UPU today welcomed the winner of its 2010 International Letter-Writing Competition.
Ho Thi Hieu Hien, 12, was at UPU headquarters in Berne to receive her prize and learn more about the organization and the Swiss capital.
The Vietnamese student was very comfortable as she read her moving letter on the importance of raising awareness of HIV/AIDS to some 250 delegates attending the plenary session of the UPU Council of Administration.
Being on her first trip abroad, Hien said she was “impressed with the Bernese Alps, the arcades of the Old City that hide many small shops and the city’s red trams that never stop.”
She said she would remember her visit forever and maybe return one day “to make a film.” Her plans for the future include studying to learn how to “write scripts and make films about people's lives.”
In fact, shortly after winning the UPU competition, she won a national film contest for students and will travel to Japan next month to receive her prize.
Her winning composition for the UPU competition was a letter addressed to Zhang Yimou, China’s famous film director, which captured the hearts and minds of the jury.
“In my films I shall convey love and pain, ingratitude and ignorance while imparting knowledge about AIDS prevention in a gentle yet forceful way in order to awaken the human conscience,” she wrote.
It is Viet Nam’s first top win in 20 years of participating in the international UPU competition. Some 1.3 million children wrote letters for the first stage of the competition, which is held at the national level.
Youth awareness
At the ceremony, Dr Hedia Belhadj, director of partnerships at UNAIDS in Geneva, congratulated the UPU for using the competition to raise awareness among young people of the importance of HIV prevention. Out of the 33 million people living with HIV, five million are young people aged 15 to 24 years. An estimated 2,500 young people become newly infected with HIV every day.
“Young people have to lead the way on prevention. In 2007, less than 40% of them had accurate and comprehensive knowledge of HIV,” she said before urging more countries to participate in the HIV prevention campaign launched last year by the UPU, UNAIDS, the International Labour Organization and UNI Global Union.
“These are excellent tools to remind young people about the need to protect oneself and, through the vast postal network, we can bring information about this disease to populations that are often not accessible by other means,” she added.