AIDS missing ‘acquired’ impact

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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 March 18, 2009
AIDS missing ‘acquired’ impact
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR


Our mindsets are determined by the words we use or don’t use. And words can also set our minds a certain way.

RECENTLY I had the pleasure of listening to one of our national poet laureates recite a poem about the birth of his daughter. It was of course in Bahasa Malaysia, and it was lovely to listen to the cadences of the language.

I don’t know very many languages that can sound quite as beautiful as the Malay language. I remember enjoying the movie Puteri Gunung Ledang precisely because of its poetic script.

At times like that, I wished I could speak my own language more elegantly than I do. I grew up in English-medium schools, including the elite government boarding school I attended for two years.


Young minds: Students attending a public speaking workshop. If we accept that every child has a right to education, then we adults cannot impede its access to knowledge in any way.

Some years after I left school, the switch to teaching entirely in Bahasa Malaysia was implemented. But during my time, the only Malay I had at school was during Bahasa Malaysia classes.

Worse still, as a Science student, I had absolutely no exposure to any literature in either English or Malay. Going overseas to study of course did nothing much for my Malay.

It was only years later, when I started to work in HIV outreach and when I had to communicate to audiences that did not necessarily understand the issue, that my Malay got the polishing it very much needed.

Even so it was a frustrating endeavour, not so much because I could not speak, since with practice my Malay improved, but because the vocabulary I needed in Malay was simply inadequate.

Just take the translation of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, for example. In Bahasa Malaysia, it comes out as Sindrom Kurang Daya Tahan. Which sounds fine except that a very key word, “acquired”, did not get a look in.

I don’t know why that is. But by not translating the word “acquired”, Malay-speaking audiences are likely to make a conceptual mistake in understanding how HIV operates.

English-speaking audiences realise that HIV is not something a person is born with nor that it occurs naturally within us. It is an infection which one can only acquire by doing something risky.

But Malay-speaking audiences are more likely to miss that point with the inadequate translation. I don’t know this scientifically, but sometimes I wonder if this missing word is the cause for much of the stigma associated with, and discrimination against, people with HIV.

People who study linguistics know what I mean. The words we use or don’t use reflect our mindsets, or they can set our minds a certain way.

So it’s not an issue of what language we use, but how well it copes with current ideas and concepts. Bahasa Malaysia is trying hard to keep up but it does that mostly by simply taking on English words.

I was shocked when years ago I was told that it is perfectly acceptable to call the TV programme, 3R, Respek, Relaks dan Respon.

Even if these words alliterated better than Hormat, Santai dan Balas, they still sound odd, but somehow also younger and cooler.

In many ways, this underscores the problem we have in keeping the teaching of Maths and Science in Bahasa Malaysia.

Unless we are not expecting our students to get very far in these two subjects, there is no reason to teach them in English.

And perhaps they won’t want to advance in these subjects if we keep teaching them in Malay, Chinese or Tamil.

But what if we have students who want to be mathematicians or scientists? At what point do we switch them over?

Or do we simply tell them that they can only go as far as our language can cope with mathematical theories and scientific concepts.

Does this then mean we can never hope for any Malaysian to become a Nobel Prize-winning scientist or mathematician?

I think that we should turn the whole question on its head and look at it from a rights-based perspective.

If we accept that every child has a right to education, then we adults cannot impede its access to knowledge in any way.

That means that if we insist that our children learn science and mathematics only in the vernacular, then to ensure that they have exactly the same rights as every other child in the world, we would have to make certain that they can access all the knowledge they need all the way to PhD level and beyond.

In other words, we would have to translate the global body of mathematical and scientific knowledge into Malay.

Why should other children have the possibility to study at Harvard University when our no-less bright children can’t because of their language?

One way to overcome that is to set up a Harvard University branch in Malaysia teaching entirely in Malay. If someone comes forward to do that, then that whole language debate becomes null and void.

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Solve disputes the right way

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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 March 4, 2009
Solve disputes the right way
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR


Politicians have been shoving and calling each other names. We’ve said big countries shouldn’t bully small ones and yet at home, a group of able-bodied men thought nothing of behaving aggressively towards an old man in a wheelchair.

SOME time ago, my nine-year old called me from school in tears because another child, much bigger than her, had shoved her.

I happened to know the mother of the other child so I called her to find out if mine had done anything to warrant it. She was appalled that her child had decided to solve a problem that way.

So she talked to her child and the next day my daughter received an apology.

Among decent right-minded people, we know that the way to solve disputes is by talking and not by pushing and shoving.

What’s more, one side cannot take advantage of the other because of any perceived weakness such as size or disability. That is not a fair fight. It’s called bullying.

If parents do not instil this sense of fairness in children from young, as my friend did, they will grow up to believe that might is always right and aggression is the only way to solve problems.

Judging by the amount of bullying we now see in schools, obviously not many children are receiving this lesson.

But who can blame them? Today we see adults who are in leadership positions and who should know better behaving no differently from schoolchildren. School bullies, to be exact.

Of late, politicians have been shoving, calling each other names and doing everything gross and crude to gain an advantage over their political adversaries.

And when called out on these, they refuse to apologise, thereby setting new levels of low in political culture and behaviour.

We used to shout out that big powerful countries should not bully small ones. Yet at home, we see a whole group of able-bodied people behaving aggressively towards an old man in a wheelchair.

Apparently this behaviour is warranted because he said some bad words about the group.

Does this warrant such aggression? Isn’t this a bit like saying that girls who wear miniskirts deserve to be raped? Or maybe this group of thugs does believe this.

Do their leaders admonish them? No, they provide excuses instead. They cannot control their followers, they said. That is a bit like Israel saying they can’t control what their F16s hit on the ground in Gaza.

Leaders who say they cannot control their followers do not deserve that title.

Is it really too much to ask for a return to civility in our politicians? Do we seriously need all this bad-temperedness just because they can’t get what they want?

It’s like watching a bunch of kindergarten children stomping their feet because they did not get the candy they wanted. Not one mature adult in the bunch.

I don’t know what bubble our politicians live in that they seem totally oblivious to the rest of us.

Don’t they realise that we, the public, are watching and forming opinions? And more importantly, already making decisions about whom we will or won’t vote for?

I, for one, will not vote for anyone who acts like a thug, for the simple reason that if I consent to a thug leading my country, I will only feel ashamed. How do I defend such uncouth people to foreign friends?

If such uncivilised people had other redeeming factors, such as fresh and new ideas on how to lead the country, that would be something. But they don’t even have that. Instead, all we can expect is more of the same and worse.

There are some countries in the world where politicians are so incompetent and governments so ineffective that almost everything is run by NGOs and civil society organisations.

The schools and hospitals run by these NGOs are excellent while those run by the government are abysmal.

While I am impressed by these efforts, I can’t help thinking that it is also an indictment of the governments, which have failed to meet any of their people’s needs.

Our problem in Malaysia is that we are so used to the Government doing everything that if it becomes incompetent, we have nothing to fall back on. Private sector services are expensive, so they are not a viable alternative for most people.

Looking at the type of people vying to run the Government these days, is there a single person who we can even look up to? Who we feel has the qualities we can admire in a leader? Who has some sort of vision of where we want to be in the future? Who isn’t constantly compromising something or other for political expediency?

I may sound naive about current political realities but maybe it’s time for a new type of politics. Otherwise, given the type of simian behaviour we are seeing these days, we may well turn into a banana republic.

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Great to be making history

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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 February 18, 2009
Great to be making history
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR


Some 250 scholars and activists – women and men – gathered in Kuala Lumpur to launch Musawah, a global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family.

WE DON’T always know when we are participating in something special and historic at the moment it is happening.

But this past weekend I have been privileged to be part of one such moment in time; Musawah, a global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family was launched here in Kuala Lumpur.

Not that everybody appreciated the import of this moment.

As 250 scholars and activists, female and male, gathered in KL from some 47 countries to discuss what can be done to ensure that the equality and justice inherent in Islam is brought to the fore in all policies related to the family, there were people who claimed that what we were doing was “insulting Islam”.

The logic that ensuring Islam treats all its adherents, male and female, equally and justly is viewed as somehow insulting to the religion escapes me completely.

The Musawah (“equality”, not as some allege, “sameness”) gathering sought to find, within Islamic texts and jurisprudence, solutions to the contemporary problems facing women and men in ways that ensure that justice is served.

As many of the scholars pointed out, Islam brought justice to the society it was revealed to via Prophet Muhammad, especially to women.

If women feel that they are being treated unjustly in many societies today, it is not a failing of Islam but of interpretations of the religion that ignored its essential just and egalitarian spirit.

And the lives of many Muslim women today are pretty miserable. In many countries, women have little say over their lives, treated as they are as properties of their fathers, and then of their husbands.

They often cannot be educated, nor take jobs, nor have the freedom to choose when to marry or how many children to have. To protest against any of these conditions has often meant that these women have had to suffer violence or worse, death.

In many countries, honour killings, where men kill female relatives for perceived insults to their family’s honour, still occur and are ex­­plained away with so-called religious reasons.

In others, women are still subjected to female genital mutilation in the name of religion, despite the fact that the Quran says absolutely nothing about it.

Our own Muslim women may not suffer the same extreme humiliations but nevertheless do not always receive the justice that they deserve, and Islam extols.

Women abandoned by their husbands and bringing up their children single-handedly still cannot be considered guardians to their own children. Their husbands can summarily divorce them without much notice or with provisions for their living and that of their children.

Attempts to amend these laws to make them better for women have thus far been derided as “changing God’s laws”, never mind that they were already amended from the originally just ones to ones that are far less fair to women.

It was exhilarating to learn from these learned scholars that God does not discriminate between men and women, both His creations, the proof of which is in the Quran itself.

Nor does it allow for men to mistreat women, enjoining repeatedly that women and orphans be always fairly treated.

Even more exhilarating was to listen to people from Morocco, Turkey and Afghanistan talk about the strides they have made to better the lot of their societies by making family laws more just and equitable. None of this was easy, and took a very long time and hard and dedicated effort. But it paid off.

Today, Morocco has a family law that describes marriage as “an equal partnership” between a man and a woman.

Turkey, which is governed by an Islamist party, has a civil and penal code that were amended to ensure that women were treated as equals in the law and not as passive recipients of whatever male jurists decided.

Even Afghanistan managed to pass a law that gave women the right to contract their own marriages, rather than through their male relatives, despite a lack of stable government and institutions.

All of these countries did it while adhering to Islamic teachings, thus showing that Islam is no barrier to justice and equality. It is thus puzzling that anyone should be critical of this effort, as if leaving Muslim women mired in suffering is desirable.

Even more bewildering is that there are women who think that striving for justice and equality in Islam is somehow wrong, as if God means for the feminine gender to be discriminated against.

I came away energised by this meeting, secure in my belief that my religion will never abandon my sisters and I whenever we are in need. If they were not before, our eyes have been opened to the glory of Islam where God loves women equally as much as He loves men.

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Stop the World, I want to end the woes

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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 February 4, 2009
Stop the World, I want to end the woes
Musings by Marina Mahathir


Instead of giving us solutions to our many problems, our leaders “treat” us to a ridiculous show. Now, if everyone, took up our own causes, then we’d probably make more progress towards solving things. And we could learn from the children.

IN the 1960s, there was a musical play called “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off” which is about a man called Littlechap who, not appreciating the loving wife he had, sought the attention of other women until he finally realised his folly.

Although my reasons are different, these days I too feel like saying “Stop the world, I want to get off!” Everywhere you turn these days, there is yet another war, another crisis and another disaster.

The truce in Gaza is tenuous; in Sri Lanka, 250,000 civilians are trapped between the government and rebel forces and are facing starvation and death.

There are bombings in a number of countries in conflict and even in a relatively peaceful Thailand, a schoolboy threw a grenade into a temple, killing seven people and injuring a hundred.

Fortunately, we have nothing to equal the crises in other parts of the world back home, nevertheless we are not immune to the world’s problems, particularly economic ones.

Yet instead of giving us solutions to such problems, our leaders “treat” us to a ridiculous show comprising various minor politicians who can’t seem to make up their minds who they want to align with.

Perhaps a new requisite for politicians we elect, to add to the already extensive list of desirable qualities, should be “decisiveness”?

What’s interesting about all these crises is how people respond to them. Some will take one or two causes and do what they can for them. Others will simply turn their minds off such issues and deal only with what affects them personally. Still others will take up certain issues and then demand that someone else does something about them.

This last trait seems to be a common one among our people. We have become used to expecting others to take care of things that we don’t realise any more how we disempower ourselves.

One example is the support for testing people for HIV mandatorily, rather than voluntarily. Generally this is based on the assumption that firstly, it is only other people who are bad; secondly, the Government must do something about those people and thirdly, we ourselves have no responsibility in ensuring that we are educated enough about the issue to prevent ourselves from getting infected.

Similarly, I find that when it comes to global causes, we often expect others to do something and assume that we ourselves have no power to do anything. And yet when someone does something, we complain about their choice of causes. Why this one, and not the other?

Not once does it occur to us that if everyone, including ourselves, took up our own causes, rather than expecting the few to take care of everything, then we’d probably make more progress towards solving them.

For instance, if someone decided to raise funds for people overseas, there is bound to be someone who will complain about them not doing the same for our own people. The assumption must be that there is not only a finite amount of money anyone can raise but also a limited amount of energy that anyone can expand on such works.

The former is false and the latter is partly true because we expect the same people to take care of every single issue. Rarely do we think that instead of spending our energy complaining, we could use it to do something ourselves about any cause we espouse.

I came across a book my daughter bought about young girls who have done inspiring things. One girl, having spent some boring weeks in hospital, had the idea to collect children’s videos for hospitals to keep other children entertained while they are warded.

Another girl decided to volunteer her dog at a hospital because pets can help in the rehabilitation of patients. And yet another girl, who had received a kidney transplant from a young fireman who subsequently lost his life in the World Trade Centre in New York, started a memorial fund to educate people about transplants.

Needless to say, none of these real-life stories were from our country. Perhaps in countries where people are encouraged to be self-reliant, children are not stopped from implementing ideas that they get. They then learn about independence and the benefits of helping others without waiting for an adult to initiate it. Children who learn to take initiatives like these grow up to be adults who are innovative as well.

Perhaps that is our problem. Initiative especially by ordinary people in dealing with problems and issues is neither encouraged nor rewarded.

We have been brainwashed into thinking that nothing can be done unless we have “power”. No doubt our leaders would prefer we believe in that too, even when they are ineffective. Maybe that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in.

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Can we hope for real change?

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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 January 21, 2009
Can we hope for real change?
Musings by Marina Mahathir


Swept into power on his campaign for change, just-inaugurated President Barack Obama represents not only the hopes of the US but also of the world.

DEAR President Obama, Please excuse this conceit. I am but one of the billions of people around the world who did not have the privilege of voting for you. Yet, like many others, I was thrilled when you won the elections because you represented such a visual change from the usual faces we see in the White House.

And I like the fact that the new First Lady is a smart woman who has a mind of her own.

I must say that my disquiet about you began when you named your Chief of Staff. I understand how important that position is and how you need someone you can trust there, so I know how much influence he will have over your decisions.

But those of us who have been hoping for some real change in your foreign policies, especially concerning Palestine, were severely disappointed. It didn’t bode well at all for global peace.

And we were right to worry. Since the Israelis started bombing Gaza, you have been silent. Your excuse was that there could be only one president at a time. But you had not hesitated to condemn what happened in Mumbai.

It is astounding to me that you, the father of two daughters, can stand by and watch the children of Gaza being killed and terrorised every day by those F16s and not express a word of sympathy to them.

Would it really have hurt to make some remark about keeping children safe wherever they might be in the world?

Mr Obama, I understand what pressures you were under when you ran for president. I know that be- cause of your race, you faced difficulties in proving that you are as good and as capable of leading your country as any other candidate.

You were constantly challenged to prove that you were as patriotic as any other American, despite a far more diverse background and experience than most of your fellow citizens. Well you did it. You were voted in despite that background.

We in the rest of the world expected that heritage to bring a perspective that takes into account the diversity of humanity. That your Kenyan relatives would give you an understanding of the difficulties the developing world faces, and the role and responsibilities that an American leader shoulders in dealing with that world.

Were we wrong? Mr Obama, I understand about political expediency. In my country, political expediency is the mainstay of every politician’s thinking.

They think not of what would be truly good for the country but what they think will win them votes. More and more, they bow to pressures from groups that claim to represent the majority when in fact they are only the loudest voices heard.

Good decent moderate people rarely get to speak, mostly because they don’t know who would listen to them. And thus far, there has been little evidence that anyone will listen to them despite the strongest of signals last March.

I know you are already looking ahead to the next election and how to win that. I know you constantly have to ensure that those who supported you in 2008 do not abandon you in 2012.

I understand also about the tough economic issues that you have to deal with in America, because nothing makes a leader’s job more perilous than when people are finding it hard to make ends meet.

But when you worry about the Americans who may lose their homes because they cannot service their bank loans and are unable to pay their medical bills because their insurance cannot cover them, spare a thought for the people in Gaza who don’t have to worry about housing loans because their homes have been reduced to rubble.

Or the ones who will have pay funeral expenses rather than hospital bills.

When you worry about the state of education in America, think about children whose schools Israeli bombs have destroyed and whose futures are now bleak because they will not get any education.

When you deal with the security of Americans, consider those who have to protect themselves not from muggers or robbers but from bombs raining down on them, and white phosphorus burning their skin.

As you try and deal with your crowded cities and poor housing, as you described in your book Dreams From My Father, take a look at a map and consider the 1.5 million people squeezed into that 10km by 40km patch of land known as the Gaza Strip. Is that humane?

Who am I, Mr Obama, but only one of the millions of people who are well aware of what is right and wrong, what is just and what is not.

If you claim to change the way things have been done all this while, then you have to re-look at some of America’s policies that have been wrong and unjust, especially the ones that have allowed millions of defenceless people to undergo abo- minable suffering just because they want to live in their own land.

Can we have the audacity to hope for that?

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