‘AIDS Camp’ Tries to Give Children a Childhood : Russia: Center offers sanctuary from the prejudice and hatred often faced by youngsters with the deadly virus.

What do you say when meeting a little boy who knows he soon will be dead?

Start with a neutral question: “So, Sasha, how old are you?”

“How old I am. . . ,” the pale youngster repeated, contemptuously. Sasha, whose eyes have dark half-circles of exhaustion under them, tugged at his faded T-shirt, looked away and muttered to himself, “I’m 20 years old.”

“Sasha, tell your uncle the truth,” his mother said.

“He’s 5 years old,” she added helpfully.

Blond Sasha looks older than 5, maybe older than 20. Though he is only three feet tall and clutches a toy red sports car in his tiny fist, he has aged decades since the day last month that he ran in and cried to his mother: “The other boys say I have AIDS, that I’m going to die soon!”

But this week, Sasha and 29 other AIDS-afflicted children and their families from across Russia left their taunting peers behind to enjoy a respite in Ust-Izhora, a small town six miles from St. Petersburg. The 30 children were examined here by doctors of the Center for Preventing and Campaigning Against AIDS.

At the center--a compound of 20-year-old buildings laid out on the high banks of the Neva River and surrounded by red stone walls--AIDS patients get more than checkups and medicine. “We’re also trying to give them a childhood,” chief doctor Yevgeny Voronin said.

The center offers a sanctuary from the prejudice and hatred often encountered by Russian children infected with the human immuno-deficiency virus. “Especially in the villages and little cities of Russia, people hate infected children and their parents,” Voronin said. “Mothers are fired from work. Their neighbors taunt them and tell them they should move away. Fathers, upon learning that their children have AIDS, often leave their families or start drinking heavily.”

At the “children’s AIDS camp,” as the 10-day session was dubbed by the local press, boys and girls from 4 to 14 stayed in private hospital rooms with their mothers, and, in some cases, with healthy brothers and sisters. They visited the circus and symphony and received Christmas gifts (yes, in August). They devoured bananas, an expensive treat at about 250 rubles (25 cents) each. And every mother received a $30 allowance to buy her children fruit.

“The mothers meet and talk, without being afraid or hiding anything,” said Yuri Fomin, chief of the hospital that hosts the center. “Back in their small hometowns, many of them keep it a strict secret that their children are ill.”

For Sasha, this was a rare chance to play with other children. He was a year old when he contracted HIV from a dirty needle in a hospital in the southern Russian city of Stavropol.

That is typical. Only one of every 20 Russian children with HIV contracts it at birth from his or her mother; 95% became infected during a two-year period, 1988 through 1989, when Russia’s rural hospitals reused needles and sterilized equipment poorly.

Sasha’s home is in Podlyosnoe, a village of 2,000 in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. There, parents swoop down on the playground and snatch their children away when he arrives.

“Not long ago, they forbade Sasha to come to kindergarten,” said his mother, Zoya Bocharova, 25. “They said that, if he showed up, the other children would all leave. Parents don’t let their children play with him. When my children go to play in the yard, all the others run away.”

Bocharova’s husband earns 17,000 rubles ($17) a month driving a tractor for a collective farm. The Russian government gives them a monthly stipend of 24,000 rubles ($24) to help cover Sasha’s medical costs.

Their other son, Sergei, 7, is healthy. But he too is shunned, and he has already missed his first year of school. Older boys tease Sasha and throw sticks at him. When Sergei defends his little brother, they beat him. “He’s in a fight nearly every day, it seems,” said Bocharova, who wept as she spoke.

The Ministry of Public Health said 274 children in Russia have AIDS; 60 more have died. “That’s only those that we know of,” Voronin said.

Among the dead are a handful of children who last summer attended the center’s camp, the year it opened. Four or five children have died since; doctors are unsure. Distressed that they cannot remember, they tick off names to each other: Anya, 4, who was so pretty; Oleg, 7, and Vova, 7.

The AIDS camp cost about $5,000 and was paid for by Norwegian and British charities.

Sponsors aren’t all foreign. Fomin said the St. Petersburg Society of Homosexuals has donated American medicines, and he praised the Ministry of Public Health for offering free plane tickets to participating families.