Sunday, 9 November 2008

Sunday, 9 November 2008

This year’s world AIDS day theme in the UK was chosen by the National AIDS Trust as PROTECTION AND RESPECT.

Well I am going to argue that there are no such things happening so far in 2008, over 26 years after the discovery of HIV.

Since the Americans as a nation elected for president a man of black origin and since I get from him more the way he chooses to express himself rather than what race he is coming from I would like to use my words also in a different, nearly poetic but not so much, way.

We human beings are seen by me as broken mirrors and when two or more get together we choose to call them couple, friends, companions, comrades, society... and the nexus that links them can be love, friendship, social rules, or any laws in general. If we have the word MIRAGE we can take it as being composed of two words – MIRROR and IMAGE, from which we take the first three letters of the word mirror (MIR) and the last three letters from the word image (AGE) and then we have the word MIR-AGE (MIRAGE). So, according with this, MIRAGE, is an image of a mirror. If the mirror is broken therefore we have human beings that when get together form a whole mirror but gives out an image that does not exist, as it’s just a mirage.

Well, before I had AIDS, I didn’t pay attention to how people were approaching HIV and AIDS issues and even for a few years everybody thought I was a carrier of the virus; only that this was reflecting an image (mirage) but it gives you an idea of how healthy I was looking like and therefore how my approach to HIV was somehow good, positive.

However, on 20 March, 1998, out of the blue completely, I got PML (a rare brain damage that happens only to about 3% of people with AIDS and this tells something else, that the proportion was even smaller) and my world conception came to a halt. Since this time I was going to experience really how it is for people to live with HIV/AIDS. And how people who think they don’t have it treat people who have it.

In the last 10.5 years I have experienced all kinds of approaches regarding my care; in the first 8 months I had the approach and incredible ignorance but not so much fear of nurses, health care assistants, occupational therapists and even doctors. After the first 8 months and until July, 2000 I experienced home carers contracted by agencies that were only interested in the care package and only at the end of that care package was Elfrid Walkingtree. Then for about 1.5 months I experienced ignorance and fear from Hackney social services (the same experience I have now with Kensington and Chelsea, so no change in area of London). After this period I have been with direct payments in which I employ my own carers, totally independent from social services (except account checking) and from agencies. Well, in these last 8 years I experienced a lot of ignorance and some fear. Ignorance belongs mainly to the Western Europeans countries; fear belongs mostly to the countries belonging to the former Soviet block, people from Africa are an exception to this as they consider themselves to be the underdogs therefore taking any job without giving much consideration to the nature it, as they just want the salary.

Today I was talking to a friend of mine who has also got AIDS, who had pneumonia, MDR TB and even cancer lately and we were commenting about the recent death of somebody we both knew, commenting that perhaps because we are very obnoxious, impatient and complain about everything and everybody, we are still alive today, although he is 62 years old and soon to be 63.

I happen to be in the front line facing every single day of my life the ignorance and sometimes fear of the people I come across, having an experience only 2 weeks ago of somebody who five days after taking the key for my home said that his family didn’t want him to work with somebody with my “HEALTH PROBLEMS” (a euphemism for HIV); this person is from the same country that somebody else told me 2.5 years ago whether he had to take an HIV test because he had been working with me for 2 months. They are both from Poland; this is a country from the former Soviet block.

Economically the common market has opened the door that will make some countries to equal with the western side of Europe within 5 years. But from a social point of view it will take a bit longer (1 year ago I was told by somebody from the same country that only 8 or 9 years ago in some state hospitals of that country were approaching people with AIDS dressed as astronauts) of course many individual people from those countries and farther afield might approach the subject without any ignorance or fear but these people are an exception according to my experience (maybe 20-25%).

However the same ignorant approach but with a lot less fear comes from people who are from this country or Germany, France, Spain, etc.

So, the old formula IGNORANCE=FEAR=DEATH is still very applicable 20 years later. What has all of this to do with the broken mirrors, you say? Well if we assume that all that we can have is we can project because it’s all we can see a mirage and this is a image from a mirror, then broken mirrors that are in better shape than other broken mirrors . I happen to be a broken mirror that is more broken than usual, I am being reminded constantly that I should not look for perfect people since I am not perfect myself. However I still need to find somebody who thinks that they need to meet a broken mirror since they are a broken mirror too.

If we, white people had given RESPECT to black people we would have achieved a boxer called Mohamed Ali (Casius Clay) and only when we gave them protection with respect we have somebody who has been elected president of the USA, Barak Obama.

Lovely!