New signs of hope for the HIV+

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com Please.

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Wednesday May 23, 2007


New signs of hope for the HIV+

If we continue our policy of providing almost-free treatment to Malaysians living with HIV, we can prevent many more deaths.

MUSING BY MARINA MAHATHIR

IT WAS one of those pieces of news that went both ways. At this past Sunday’s annual International AIDS Memorial Day commemoration, I caught up with many colleagues whom I had not seen for a long time.

One of them, from support group Prihatin for HIV-positive women in Kota Baru, told me that they were doing well after only three years. When they first started, they had over 100 women as members, mostly single mothers left widowed by AIDS. Now they have over 300.

On the one hand, it was good that these women had found a place they could go to for information, counselling and other help, as well as meet others in the same situation.

Many of them had in fact been HIV-positive for many, many years and had led lonely lives thinking they would always have to live hiding their status from the world. Learning about Prihatin had given them hope.

But on the other hand, I could not help but wonder. If Kota Baru alone had 300 HIV-positive single mothers, how many more must there be in other towns and cities around the country? Who would provide the type of help they need?

Still, there are signs of hope. Prihatin is training some other HIV-positive single mothers in Kedah to be peer educators and to start support groups to others like them. In Perak, the Buddies of Ipoh provide the same service to people with HIV.

One remarkable woman, known as Kak Pi, defies every negative stereotype that is placed on religious women by giving comfort and solace to women living with HIV without making any judgement on them.

While these efforts are examples of “leading the way to a world without HIV/AIDS”, the theme of this year’s commemoration, still it is hard to ignore the fact that there have been 79,389 reported cases of HIV/AIDS since the first one was detected in Malaysia 21 years ago. And of that, 9,155 have died.

The truly sad fact is that none of this is really necessary. If we had instituted realistic prevention programmes all those years ago, we would probably have not had these numbers by now.

And if we continue our policy of providing almost-free treatment to Malaysians living with HIV, we can prevent many more deaths as well as the family and community devastation that comes with them.

The only snag would be the lack of political will. If the political will to tackle HIV/AIDS slackens, we will hear nothing about AIDS in our country except for those few occasions during the year when events such as this are held.

If other priorities get in the way of people’s lives, the medicines to treat people with HIV will become unaffordable again and more lives will be lost. If effective prevention programmes lose out to political expediency, opportunities will be lost and may never be found again.

Recently, a delegation from our Prisons Department visited Iran to see at first hand how the Iranians tackle HIV/AIDS in the prison system. Despite its conservative image, Iran runs both needle exchange programmes and distributes condoms to prisoners.

Our delegation was impressed and is keen to do the same back home. The only thing that would stymie that would be weak or non-existent political will.

In the meantime, we need to open our eyes to more hotspots, at people who remain very vulnerable to HIV through no fault of their own. While HIV prevention for our own people is still inadequate, what is there for those among us whom we don’t even acknowledge exist?

What information do we provide for migrant workers who don’t speak any of our languages? How do these messages reach those whom we don’t even recognise such as refugees? We can’t wish them away when they are healthy, what more when they get sick with AIDS.

My colleagues working with refugees tell me that, increasingly, they are seeing HIV infections among them. Deporting them is no answer when there is nowhere that will take them.

Besides prevention and treatment, the component of a comprehensive response to AIDS that is still missing is care. Care means ensuring that people remain productive citizens even if they are HIV-positive, with jobs and homes and the means to care for their families.

Care includes policies that ensure stigma and discrimination against people with HIV is simply not tolerated. It means devising policies and frameworks that keep children with HIV and AIDS orphans in school. It involves providing micro-credit loans to AIDS widows so they can provide for their children.

None of this comes under the Health Ministry, the traditional domain of HIV/AIDS. Unless other ministries also have HIV/AIDS policies, care will forever remain neglected, and that caring society we want will never emerge.

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Blogging 101 for politicians

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL
The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com Please.
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Wednesday May 9, 2007


Blogging 101 for politicians

MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Blogs and bloggers have come under the microscope once again but for the most part the people complaining haven't the faintest idea what blogging is all about, to the point that it's almost embarrassing.

IN most fields, differentiations are made between those considered amateurs and those deemed professionals.

Talented singers are amateurs when they go on American Idol and immediately become professionals when they win. Those who lug their clubs around the greens on a weekend will never be considered professional unless, like Tiger Woods, they do nothing else but play golf and get paid for it.

Your best friend may be spot-on in diagnosing what’s causing your headaches but you still need to go to a certified doctor to be able to do anything about it.

In other words, there is a line drawn between the amateur and professional worlds that is determined either by entry barriers such as full-time study, exams and other means of certification or by payment for the work done.

The one exception is, perhaps, fulltime homemakers who do not have to pass any exams to become professional, nor are they ever paid.

There are lots of areas of interest where there are very few entry barriers except for enthusiasm and staying power.

In the modern world of the Internet, there is of course the phenomenon of blogging.

For those who do not understand blogging, by and large most bloggers are basically writing public diaries. They may write about their everyday lives, almost as if to themselves, except that they put it up for public viewing.

What differentiates one from another is basically the quality of content and writing. A person who leads an interesting life and can write eloquently about it online is going to have a much more popular blog than someone who has a very routine life.

There are millions of blogs and some of the most interesting ones are those written by people who are, for example, cancer survivors who write about how they cope with everyday life and people who live in war zones like Iraq who give literally an insider’s view of the conflict.

What is wonderful about blogging is that there is no entry barrier except perhaps access to the Internet and a facility for language. Anyone and everyone can start one, on any subject. A friend of mine who lives in France writes about Malaysian food in French.

Bloggers do not have to study how to blog, sit for any qualifying exam, nor are paid for it. So there is no such thing as a professional blogger and a non-professional one. True, there are some full-time ones, people who seem to do nothing but blog.

But most bloggers have a life outside the Internet and write their thoughts for public consumption mostly as a hobby. It is however a hobby that is absorbing and exciting because unlike most hobbies, you do have an audience that is eager to and avidly does interact with you.

The wonderful thing about blogging is that it allows an individual to give voice to their thoughts when there are few other avenues available. Some of these thoughts are not necessarily positive and it has always mystified me why people complain about “political” bloggers who generally can make very erudite comments about national issues, and then say nothing about the fascist and racist bloggers who write under the guise of religion.

But for the most part, most bloggers are people who simply want to air their views through this exciting new medium.

Recent proposals to register bloggers or to categorise them into “professional” and “non-professional” bloggers only serves to confirm what anyone savvy with the Internet thinks: that politicians are clueless as to what blogging is.

Which is rather odd since politics is the other area where “professional” and “amateur” has no meaning. It makes even less sense when many bloggers are writing under pseudonyms. If this were another time, would you register Mark Twain or Samuel J. Clemens?

Perhaps what we need to professionalise are comments made about bloggers. At the moment, their amateurishness is laughably embarrassing.

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Competing for sympathy and money

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com Please.

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Wednesday April 25, 2007


Competing for sympathy and money

Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR

There is a mistaken belief that charities must always be run by volunteers, but there is no such thing as a full-time volunteer.

RECENTLY an article appeared in this paper commenting on the rise in the numbers of professional fundraisers for charities. Much justifiable tut-tutting was done at the very idea that fundraising for charity could have a commercial element.

But what was interesting to me was the reaction by several people who e-mailed me, saying they thought that the article would be very detrimental to genuine charities because people would simply become even more cynical about donating.

It will be good to put the whole issue of fundraising in this country in context. Despite the constant stream of news of people donating money to various causes, fundraising is still a difficult thing to do for individual charities.

For one thing, it takes a lot of time, and unless you have people dedicated to just doing this, fundraising can distract from doing actual work. Anyone who runs an orphanage or shelter knows that there are daily issues to deal with, which leaves very little time to go out and look for money.

Secondly, fundraising is competitive. You have to “compete” for the sympathy, and therefore the wallets, of companies who get dozens of appeals every year, with bigger better-known charities, politically-favoured causes and with unexpected natural disasters.

Nobody is saying that the tsunami, for instance, was an undeserving cause, but it did sweep up a lot of money, leaving very little for others. At least that’s what many companies said.

In this type of environment, it is no wonder that charities find

professional fundraising tempting. It guarantees you some money and it frees you from the hassle of actually having to go out and raise funds.

Basically, if a charity agrees

with the fundraiser on what they expect to get, then that is their business.

The question is really about the public’s perception of this. In some ways, the public view of charity has not evolved with the times. Often, charity means giving money directly to someone in need, which is fine for individual cases.

But a charity that is providing a service for people in need also needs money to run itself. Without the ability to pay for the right people to run homes or do counselling, they cannot provide the service. Yet this is often what people refuse to pay for.

There is a mistaken belief that charities must always be run by volunteers, but there is no such thing as a full-time volunteer. Unless the person is a very wealthy person already, charities are run by professionals.

Rather than condemning professional fundraisers outright, there should be some sort of regulatory action instead.

There has to be, first, some way of ensuring that all genuine charities get funding in an equitable manner. This will stop the dependence on VIPs as patrons, because those who have no access to such VIPs will obviously be disadvantaged.

Second, all charities should be required to be accountable for the money given to them, whether by the Government or the private sector. There is a need to develop the capacities of smaller charities to keep accounts and reports properly.

Third, there should be a way of defining and regulating professional fundraisers. There are many people who offer to raise funds for charity as a way of getting round some tax regulations.

Some charities are so pleased to be beneficiaries that they allow their names to be used in such a way, and receive very little for it. It would be up to the charities themselves to ensure that they are not exploited.

What I find most disturbing is the more ad hoc fundraising by organisations that people know very little about. I often see young people hanging around banks and restaurants in my neighbourhood asking for donations and showing supposed letters of support from so-called VIPs.

Often they can tell you nothing about either the cause, the organisation or the VIP. You can never know whether the money gets to the people it is purportedly for, because you will never see anything that confirms that.

But the people most exploited are these so-called volunteers. Some of them receive a “commission” for each donation they get.

But that commission is a pittance. They have to put up with the humiliation of having to stand on street corners to appeal for donations.

The public is often sceptical, not least because the volunteers often cannot explain the cause they are supposedly raising money for. This is not surprising; they are not “volunteers” for the cause, they are “volunteers” for the fundraiser.

It is this exploitation of young people in need of a job that should be stopped. But mostly, there is a need to stop the factors that cause cynicism about charity.

Ensuring causes are genuine would be a good start.

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