2 posts tagged “aids”

OTTAWA (CP) Tue Feb 20, 5:29 PM:

     "If an HIV vaccine were discovered at the new Canadian centre, the patent would not belong to any private company, the government said. That would allow the drugs to be cheaply produced and distributed."

This is the kind of news you love waking up to.  My friend Zeke Poutine (her name in Second Life, and one righteously passionate community-minded lady) helped shape the global AIDS conference in Toronto this past summer where our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, had been expected to announce what he's just shared with us alongside Bill Gates this week:  that our government will commit $111 million to a new fund called the Canadian HIV Vaccine Initiative, with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledging another $28 million to it.  Part of the effort includes Canada's promise to host a new HIV vaccine research centre, with the most exciting notion being captured in the pull-quote I've shared above.

While it's expected to take perhaps ten years to successfully cultivate a vaccine, it's ten years invested into putting the brakes on the greatest health crisis of our time.  There are some frightening statistics that come along for the ride, including the fact that while 1.4 million people got treatment last year, over 5 million more people contracted HIV, and more than 40 million people are already living with virus.

     "What kind of people are we?  How did we come to this point?  Where are we going?"

Those are the three questions posed in the video below.

A Closer Walk: Online Vignette

We've become a bit numb to it all, and that's a dangerous thing.  It's why I wish people would set just a bit of time aside to watch Bob Bilheimer's film "A Closer Walk".  (click to watch a vignette from it now)

Bob came up with the idea for the film with the late Jonathan Mann (killed on one of the planes that was used to attack the U.S. during 9/11), architect of the World Health Organization's response to global AIDS.  It's just a profound look at not only where things are at, but what can be done.  I've got to dig up the online redux of it to share here, because it really has a great deal of impact in even the first few minutes you watch. 

One of the reasons people disconnect when something like AIDs comes into the conversation is because it's such a large, daunting and seemingly endless challenge that it leaves you saying "what could I possibly do about it anyway?"

So, let me leave you with a bit of an answer, while I share a brief vignette from Bob's video with you ...

I really do want you to "walk the walk" with me, so here's a place to start:

What can I do?

Family Vilakati

There are times when I find myself getting entirely too caught up in the tools themselves, and I forget what it was that compelled me to become a toolsmith in the first place.  I have a foster son in Lusaka, Zambia, and it's his picture that constantly challenges me to keep my head and heart in synch.

In trying to figure out how to share some of the videos that are important to me, and grumbling about the fact that I've organized them in my MySpace page and cannot really figure out if there's a reasonable way to share them in here, I stopped to watch one called "Family Vilakati".  It's a very personal -- and very profound -- 10 minute documentary that's barely a snippet of the lives of a family of orphaned children in Swaziland.  12% of all children in Swaziland are parentless.  Think about that for a moment.  Look out your window, down your street, and think about that: one in every ten houses on your block filled with young children, living on their own.

AIDS has wiped out entire generations, hitting hardest in the southern sub-saharan regions of Africa, where entire villages are comprised of only children and grandparents, with no one left in between.

This is the thing that calls to me most as a better world scout.  At it's roots:  extreme poverty, spawning easily preventable diseases because of a lack of potable water and food.

Rather than editorializing, which I'm prone to do, I just want to invite you to take the next ten minutes to click on the link above, and come with me into the small mud that's home to these children, and simply watch, listen.

One of the things I'm most committed to at Second Life, and what drew me there in the first place, was to find a way of drawing closer to natural allies and sharing the stories of what works.  What makes communities healthier?  more resilient?  What can we learn from these things that will allow us to take them into other communities and scale them up?  My friend, Riversong Garden, is shepherding this kind of trek through the Better World Island initiative at Second Life, and I'm hoping we can find a way to cultivate significant uplift around this very thing: what works, and in this case, what works in nurturing generations of orphaned children left behind by AIDS, and in stopping the greatest humanitarian crisis in our lifetime.

I've added a book called "Mountains Beyond Mountains" into my sidebar.  It's the story of Dr. Paul Farmer, a man largely scored and ridiculed in his own medical community for saying ignoring "invisible people" in places like Haiti and Africa is not acceptable.  The success that Paul has had in turning around a community ravaged by AIDs by simply ensuring the necessary anti-retroviral drugs are made available is remarkable.  It's a simple thing, and something worth doing in communities all throughout the world, so that parents are no longer an absent generation in communities.

I ask you to watch the video above, listen to these children, left behind by parents who died of AIDs, like millions of other children throughout Africa and so many other corners of the world, and ask yourself this:  is it okay with you?

Bob Bilheimer - "A Closer Walk"

If you find yourself in a restless place after watching the Family Vilakati, and want to dig deeper, I'd like to share another treasure from my personal shelves: Bob Bilheimer's "A Closer Walk".  You can listen to Bob here, as he talks about the making of his own documentary about the missing generations, and that AIDS will continue to have as it snowballs at an unprecedented pace.  I met Bob online through my friends Dr. Tommy Clarke, Kirk Friedrich and Ethan Zohn, as they worked to get this video onto the air as part of their own effort to nurture both an understanding and a change in the behaviours that lead to the ravages of AIDS.  It's a profound and very difficult look at how our ability to "not give a damn" on a global level has put us directly in the crosshairs of a pandemic that threatens us all.

Look at your children.  Look at the children in these videos.  Is one life worth less than another?

Riversong Garden and her husband, Ray Golding, are active within Second Life through Better World Island.  They travel back and forth between Africa making a difference several times each year.  Zeke Poutine is another Better World Islander working around the issue of AIDs in Africa through SOLID, and championed the "crosses" project in Second Life last year.  In Kenzo, Sky Clymer and Lars Took three more examples of better world scouts active through the Peace Tiles initiative.  Jamie Neutra has championed Camp Darfur.  There are a handful of simple places where you can engage in Second Life if you're ready to "do something".  Don't be numb ...