Banging on Policymakers’ Doors

By Lynette Lee Corporal

BALI, Aug 12 (TerraViva) — ”We’ll bang on the door and force them to open it,” enthused 21-year-old youth leader Ankit Saxena, frustrated by the difficulty of penetrating the world of policymakers to get them to take more action on HIV/AIDS.Saxena’s statement might well describe the sentiments of others at the Asia-Pacific Village on the ground floor of the Bali International Convention Centre, where exhibitors are making their voices heard amid the din of discussions on the medical, socio-cultural, legal, economic, political and religious aspects of the pandemic going on in different rooms in this venue.

This they are doing via creative means, as evident in the vibrance and richness of the village booths and displays, which range from stalls with slogans on HIV and AIDS, plays and visual exhibits.

“We want a meaningful youth involvement on the national level but they’re not listening. Yes, we do see a few youth representatives sitting in councils in the national arena. But oftentimes this is just a token,” 23-year-old Nepali youth Ajay Kumar.

Kumar and Saxena are members of the Bali Youth Force (BYF), an alliance of local and international youth organisations pushing for the recognition of the rights of young people, especially in the HIV/AIDS campaign.

The BYF, which brought more than 130 youth delegates to ICAAP, gathered recommendations from young people across the region, including on the need to reduce stigma and discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS. These also sought more financial support for youth-led projects and a recognition of the need to fulfill young people’s sexual and reproductive rights, to name a few.

“So far there have only been policies, but they haven’t been implemented,” said Saxena.

For Australian artist Kim Davis, the implementation of policies without being sensitive to local culture and tradition is ineffective. The founder of Globally Aware, an HIV/AIDS education and advocacy group based in Bali, Davis has been involved in HIV work for the last 15 years.

“We want to enable people to have their own unfettered voice. Our goal is to engage the community and create a dialogue via art and health (education) in the context of the culture they are in,” Davis told TerraViva.

While she is glad to see positive changes, especially in growing access to anti-retroviral treatment, Davis is still dismayed by the lack of infrastructure, testing and HIV/AIDS-trained doctors in the country. Stigma, discrimination and other forms of human rights violations also need to be addressed, she added.

But Davis’ biggest gripe is the disconnect between programmes and the need of the communities. “Programmes and projects created by developing countries should be adapted culturally. Sex workers, street children, intravenous drug users all have specific, very localised needs, which more often than not are not being met,” said Davis, who has also begun a birthing programme for HIV-positive women.

Meaningful consultations with the local people, she said, are needed. Funders have a tendency to just look at the amount and the desired result and see the whole process as just a project and not a living, breathing community with specific needs and sensibilities, she added.

It is this same need for localised services that prompted a group of nurses in Taiwan to form a foundation that trains medical staff on interacting with people with HIV and AIDS. The Nurses’ AIDS Prevention Foundation (NAPF) looks not only at HIV/AIDS education for nurses, but promotes nurses’ rights and gives better treatment services to people with HIV/AIDS.

“There used to be a time when nurses in hospitals were afraid to treat HIV-positive people for fear of contracting the disease themselves,” said NAPF secretary Ku Shu-Fang.

Thousands of copies of the ‘AIDS Nursing Handbook, AIDS Nursing and Care and Counselling for People Living with HIV/AIDS’ have already been printed and distributed to nurses in Taiwan since 1997. Founded in 1995, the NAPF has trained 14,654 nurses in AIDS nursing and has conducted academic exchanges with other cities in mainland China, its brochure said.

“When we started the project, the most difficult thing to overcome was good communication with HIV-positive people and the nursing staff,” Ku said, adding that stigma and discrimination against PLHIV has been decreasing over the years.

According to Taiwan’s Centres for Disease Control, Taiwan has 17,680 HIV cases as of July 2009 and 5,735 people have full-blown AIDS. More than 1,400 HIV-positive cases are women and 16,192 are men. Forty-one percent of those with HIV got the infection through heterosexual sex, 21 to 26 percent from injecting drug use. A total of 20.31 percent were homosexuals.

Over at the Youth Corner Commitment Desk are messages from a mix of ICAAP participants who wrote down their thoughts after days of attending the conference.

“Stop discrimination!!! Talk less, do more!!!” wrote ‘Melly’ from Indonesia. An anonymous writer was more hopeful: “Youth, the force to make (the) impossible possible.”

Another noted the irony of increasing pressure on developing countries’ resources for fighting the pandemic against the backdrop of the global financial crisis, scribbling that “HIV is not in recession”. “Avoid the virus, NOT the people!” said another on stigma and discrimination faced by those living with HIV.

Over at the HIV/AIDS education campaign board, signatures have begun to pile up from delegates from countries such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, and Thailand, to name a few. The symbolic signature board aims to encourage people to intensify efforts “to ensure that effective health and sexuality education is accessible to all young people at school”.

“Passion is a most important thing in HIV/AIDS work, because it’s what drives you to go on amid the challenges and it opens up opportunities for dialogue within the community,” added Davis. (END/IPSAP-TV/LLC/JS/09)