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Commentary Field
| Scenarios Project/Website |
| Do you have an opinion you would like to share on the HIV/AIDS issue in Africa, on the Scenarios Project or on the web site? Please use the form below to give us your feedback. |
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As a Social Worker with over 20 years of professional practice,it is clear to me that the HIV/AIDS pandemic is an opportunity to return with new insight to the WHO definition of health as ’a complete state of physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity."
I have been encouraged and inspired by clients who even despite the PRESENCE of the ’disease and infirmity’ are living productive and healthy lives OFTEN EVEN MORE SO because, having come to terms with the fact of the virus in their system, have realised that life is precious. By concentrating on developing healthy relationships (with themselves, interpersonally, socially etc) it seems that this creates resilience from within, boosting the immune system.
I have a cousin who is HIV positive, and has been so for nearly 20 years, and still remains relatively healthy. 10 years ago he told me that an important part of his way of coping was to ’befriend’ the virus within him. To - as it were - ’love his enemy’. I know this sounds very counter-intuitive, but whenever I hear people talking about the ’war on HIV/AIDS’ I think of him and wonder if we are missing the point completely by framing HIV/AIDS as a battlefield, using military metaphors.
Perhaps we will overcome the ’enemy’ only by understanding it better, and ultimately overcoming it by following the same organic logic of transmission that it has used to spread itself. The current paradigm of ’prevention’ still uses fear to motivate and implicitly follows a ’command and control’ logic. Maybe we need to say something like "hey! Promotion is the best form of prevention!" i.e "lets concentrate on enabling the most susceptible groups of young people to create for themselves more ’complete states of physical, mental and social well-being’, and engage in health promotion, using organic/systems learning approaches that empower vulnerable people to both develop subjective resilience and endogenously manage their way out of circumstances of suscepibility they may find themselves in.
I am interested to see to what extent the various scenarios reflect this perspective, and hope that there is at least one scenario that makes a ’paradigm shift’ toward a holistic, more dialectical/emancipatory/public health approach than the dualistic, reductionist, technocratic,linear, analytical thinking that is still so dominant in our world. Perhaps HIV/AIDS is exactly the scourge we need to help us transcend the mechanistic/ deterministics models of thinking that still prevails - remembering of course Einsteins famous quote "“The significant problems we face cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that created them” -John Clarke
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My daughter, who is in her first year of junior college(CEGEP) has to do a project on a social issue ans she has chosen AIDS in Africa.
In order to help her, I did a brief literature search and came upon the UNAIDS site which I found excellent. As you will agree, one of the best ways to combat this problem is through awareness and information. I think it would be useful to prepare a document (or several one for elementary school and one for high school) which could be used as an educational tool in North America. Pressure could be put on local school boards to include Aids in Africa in their school curriculum with some social and historical background so that future generations could understand the complexity of the problem.
We now recycle tin, glass and plastic as a matter of course and this is due in a large part to ecology education in the schools. Education about AIDS in Africa will perhaps sensitize future generations to the fact that this epidemic is everybody’s problem and that the world should work together to solve it. -Dr. Mary-Ann Kallai-Sanfaçon,PhD,CSPQ,FCACB (Clinical Chemist)
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I think this site will make a big difference in the way information about AIDS in Africa is shared. -Meseret Yirga
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| Comments on the Scenarios (Participants only) |
| This space is for the workshop participants to send in their comments on the draft scenarios. |
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