I’m off to Zambia on Monday. I wish it was under better circumstances, but it’s to go and be with my ill brother, to spend some time with him and help him get better. At the same time I think it will be a good time for me to go and get a reality check.
When your work revolves around HIV prevention for young people, it’s kind of hard to do it effectively when you’re 1,000 of miles away from the problem and not getting a sense of what’s happening on the ground. Yes I read the reports and the briefings and try to keep up to date with what is proving to work and what doesn’t work. But whenever I go back to Africa, or any region with high prevalence rates, you sometimes get the sense that some of those reports are just words. You can’t know for real without seeing and experiencing the impact firsthand.
Working to improve the lives of people, whether it be through poverty, infant/maternal mortality, sexual health etc, is hard. It’s hard because even the small progress made is still insignificant to the problem. It almost seems insurmountable. And then when something hits home – especially for those of us who are personally invested in these issues, you get the feeling of ‘why do i bother? if nothing is changing, why do it?’
I know for some people this is a job, for me this isn’t just a job, it’s a huge part of my life. And if we’re not going to get it right, why are we doing it?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not demotivated, I’m just feeling challenged. So while I’ll be taking a time out to be with family, I hope I’ll come back re-focused, with some lessons learnt that I can incorporate in what I do.
Anyway, I’ve hardly been that regular with my blogs these last few weeks, but hopefully I’ll come back full of stories to tell!
cathyphiri.com 
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May 1, 2010 at 11:36 pm
Robin
Prevention of HIV is really challenging. Addressing stigma and discrimination is challening. Universal access is challenging. It can be very frustrating and I hear you. Personally I feel that HIV and AIDS has taken on a life of its own- it’s become a “cross cutting issue” as the say in the “industry” (because that’s what most of this feels like).I really used to believe in lifeskills, education, communication campaigns and alot of that. But I feel more and more jaded these days and even though I know HIV is a social/economic/cultural/gender/behavioural…issue, I just feel that first and foremost we should treat HIV and AIDS as a health issue. We need to invest in more money to treat the disease and find that cure because honestly, I don’t believe prevention of any sexually transmitted infection has ever had that much success. The reason why we don’t harp on about syphillis (which can be just as nasty as HIV if left untreated) is because we have a cure. Thats the only real difference.
I’m not saying that we should stop our prevention efforts but we also need to be realistic. Human behaviour is hard to change. The best prevention will be a vaccine, the best treatment will be a cure. I eagerly await that day.
June 14, 2010 at 11:35 am
cathynphiri
Actually Robin, there’s a lot in what you said that I agree with. For one I think that ‘prevention’ campaigns have taken a life of their own and have now moved on to be about the coolest, slickest initiative, but also making sure we’re PC enough not to offend this group and that. When we sit back and look at it all, I think most people have been doing this so long that they’ve forgotten the basics. People need to get back to talking about what HIV is – at its very basic form of a virus – and break down what it means to be infected and just the health side of it. I’ve been doing ‘prevention’ work for about 12 years now and only recently have i started learning about what happens to a person’s body when the virus enters it – because now i need to know because of my family. And in way that’s why I was so excited about Discovery’s film concept, because we have forgotten that HIV is a health issue at its core. Maybe I’m starting to get jaded too.