Far EastEnders

When a student nurse is seen on television enjoying a night of drunken, condomless passion, it will, AIDS educators hope, prove compelling, edge of the seat stuff for millions of Cambodian peasants. “Will the student contract HIV?” “How will his friends and colleagues treat him if he has?” “Where willhis future then lie?”

Twenty five years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia's largely rural population is being introduced to a style of television drama that is more familiar in the decadent West. Soap opera is hitting the Cambodian countryside.

But this is a soap with a difference—one that will provide as many answers as it does questions. For the hospital drama series, Rous Cheat Chivit [Taste of Life], is a new and, it is intended, entertaining way to educate the Cambodian people in the facts of HIV and AIDS.

“By the time our student nurse has his HIV test it'll be a third of the way through the series,” said Matthew Robinson, the former EastEnders producer and head of drama for BBC Wales who heads the soap opera project for the BBC's World Service Trust. “People will really care what happens to him.”

They will, he adds, also have absorbed covert messages about responsible drinking, transmission of HIV, HIV testing, and the social stigma associated with the virus.