Report - Sida Studi

Appendix 3: The three daily newsletters
us that although all religions have troubles with these
issues, they prize above all the sanctity of human life,
human dignity, and their role in supporting and informing
and thereby protecting young people.
An agenda has been set for the partnership we demanded
from the start of the meeting.
Administration
Just to remind you that tonight is a free evening. Work
hard, then go and enjoy Lisbon!
Newsletter 2
A little poem
HIV is very dangerous,
Lots of people are dying
Mostly young people
Innocent children and dying
Everyday in Africa
Age between 25-40 years
And those people in Africa
Who are dying,
Have no one to help them
There is no treatment!!
Here in Europe
They get treatment
So they can live long
HIV is bad
It makes us sad
People are dying
And children are hurt
Uma, Lamair and Nimao
15 years old from Somalia
Welcome
Welcome to the second edition of our conference newsletter.
Apologies that we have not been able to make this
available to you in languages other than English but
resources do not permit us to cover all the languages represented
here – which are many given that participants
come from over fifty different countries. By now, we have
all had an opportunity to enjoy of some of the charms of
Lisbon, to get to know each other a little better and really
get into our meeting. Some of you may not be aware
what a different kind of meeting it is from any previous
AIDS & Mobility meeting especially in terms of the extent
to which it represents the people whose interests we are
discussing – young people, people from migrant communities
and migrants themselves and PLWHA.
Young people doing it for themselves
The high point for many people was the presentation
yesterday afternoon of the Safe Sex Comedy Show from
Amsterdam. This was a really exciting and fresh injection
of youth into many people’s thinking about how to
engage and reach young people with HIV/AIDS prevention.
As they said, we really began, in a most concrete way, to
‘talk about sex baby…’. Through the medium of theatre
we heard from young women and young men about
some of the realities of their lives – the nervousness and
anxiety with which people approach their first sexual
intercourse and especially the pressure boys feel under
because of the assumption that, ‘…you gonna know what
to do to’. We heard too about the career of ‘Mr Herpes’
and his family of sexually transmitted diseases, the desperation
and isolation felt by young women abandoned
in pregnancy by young men who ‘…came and saw and…
disappeared’ leaving them to become women who are
still only ‘…a child carrying and growing a child inside’.
There was a powerful call to challenge this sexism and
that of the whole health system in the chant for ‘…heroes’.
We followed a young man through his experiences of
visiting a STI clinic and another who was ‘Janet trapped
inside the body of John’ and another macho man ending
with a challenge to deal with homophobia and sexism,
and all other assumptions we make about other people’s
sex and sexuality, to ‘mind our own’.
I felt, like many others, deeply touched by the moments
of recognition offered by this performance, by its sometimes
brutal honesty. We were reminded that to speak
directly to young people we should sometimes simply
support them to do it for themselves.
Workshops
The first series of workshop meetings were the other
main event of the day. Many people really enjoyed the
opportunity to get into a smaller group environment,
share their views, experiences and responses to the earlier
part of the meeting. Of course, there was a feeling
that the sessions were too short and there was, as always,
more to say and do than could be fitted in. So much so
that some people even came back to them in the time set
aside for lunch. This is the place for a big thank you to
our rapporteurs for all their help in recording these sessions
and making it possible to identify some important
highlights from across the sessions including:
• Broad agreement on the importance of engaging in
genuine partnerships in HIV/AIDS prevention and care
– whether in the education of religious leaders, young
people as health actors and recipients of health messages,
other organisations or migrant communities and groups.
• The importance of working from a rights-based
approach which foregrounds the individual and the
principles of self-determination and rights to dignity
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