Re: Health Minister's positive gesture

[Guest guest]

Dear INP+ and Forum,

Ref: INP+ posting " The photograph of Hon' Health Minister Smt. Sushma Swaraj

hugging Benson and Bency, in The Hindu, is a heart warming one. Actions

definitely speak louder than words " .

The gesture of the Health Minister is surely heartening and hopefully it would

not end at the clichéd soft targets for mollycoddling, namely children, but

would extend to all the other segments of the affected/infected population.

I hope the understanding that is hopefully dawning on the Health Minister about

the HIV pandemic and how protection and promotion of rights, and elimination of

stigma and discrimination, is crucial to containing the epidemic, would mean

that I shall see some day when she would find it in herself to go up to a sex

worker of Sonagachi or Surat, treat her as a human being and hug her. I hope to

see the day when she would have the courage to look facts into the eye and walk

into a support group meeting of MSM and hug those there. I hope one day she

would hug some destitute drug user from Yamuna Pushta, and not be bothered by

the smell of his body or the gore of his wounds.

There are a lot of hopes there, and the given past experience, the scepticism

that these are hopes doomed to be belied. But then hope is what carries us on in

the fight against the sly virus. In this a partially sensitised Health minister

is a better thing than an insensitive and insensible Health minister I suppose.

If the children benefit, but CSW, MSM, IDUs don't, then that is better than

no-one benefiting at all.

Win some Lose Some, Dear Health Minister.

Regards and best

Aditya Bondyopadhyay

E-mail: <adit@...>

[Guest guest]

Dear Readers,

Well I'm sure that it is now no secret that I am writing from Kenya in Africa !.

I too was pleased to see the attitudinal change of the health minister. I have

been granted a scholarship to attend the Chennai conference on 9th November and

have been asked to speak on Stigma & Discrimination for 15 mins. Those of you

that know me would know that any topic I spoke on would go much longer than 15

mins so this will be a challenge.

What I can say is that we all know how quickly stigma and discrimination can

kill a +ve patient and I have some stories to share about just how and why the

speed of death occurs.

What will be more difficult I think is to help us understand just exactly what

is Stigma and Discrimination and how it enters into our psyche. It is of course

a learned response and it can be unlearned but first it needs to be properly

understood. The task for me is to help in an understanding in 15 mins.

What the Health Minister is demonstrating is her effort to unlearn some innate

instincts. The school board and teaching staff in Kerala have also had some

sleepless nights while they unpack their learned responses. Those of us working

with other marginalised groups must remember when we started how we had to

unpack certain presumptions about the people who were looked down on.

As a child I was always being told never to put coins in my mouth and when I

asked why I was always told that they might have been in a chinamans ear. I had

very magnified impressions of dirty ears of chinamen as I grew up and as I

studied Australian history I learned about the ways chinese miners chose to

protect their wealth and ears were well and truly in the history books. I also

learned that quite a lot of other places were used such as the crotch so I guess

there were things about coinage that kids like me needed to know but I never

told my kids about chinamen's ears, only that coins are handled a lot and often

live in the same pockets as the handkerchieves on which we all blow our noses.

This seemed to be an equally satisfying reason not to put them in their mouths

without stigmatising a racial group.

Just a few thoughts about stigma and discrimination and the requirement for each

of us to address it where it resides. Inside of our psyches. The Health Minister

has shown us it can be done progressively, now it is up to us to follow her

lead, not to expect her to go about demonstrating anti stigmatic behaviour on

our behalf.

Geoffrey

e-MAIL: gheaviside@...