INFORMATION ASSAULT NEEDED TO COMBAT AIDS

An information blitz on HIV/AIDS, including the scheduling of early afternoon television and radio talk shows, should be pursued by Government in a bid to target a wider range of audiences in its bid to combat the sexually transmitted scourge. It is not enough simply to have the odd discussion on TV morning talk shows, admittedly important, which are aired at a time when many housewives, real mothers, may be busy preparing their children for school, or the children and others rushing off to school or work. In turn there are those who may be turned off by discussions on HIV/AIDS at breakfast time.

What the Ministry of Information can do is arrange for the scheduling of additional daily talk shows, Monday to Friday, on State owned television and radio stations between the hours of 12 noon and 2 p.m., and 4.30 p.m. and 5.30 p.m. This would enable the Information Ministry to optimise its audience reach. Listeners must be able to call in questions to talk show hosts and guests on the programmes. Meanwhile, the shows would not merely deal with HIV/AIDS, but with a wide range of topical issues including the question of positive parenting, the need to rescue street children, how to approach and deal with violence in schools and vocational training.

In addition, there can be such topics as Standard English versus dialect; strategies for the encouraging of a sense of self worth and self esteem in the young; the need for increased employment of locally composed music and songs, for example the Calypso, Chutney and the bhajan, and the need for increased use of the sitar, the tassa drum and the steelpan in schools; the promotion of sports and local literature, among others, in nation building, and the need to develop niche markets for specialty sugars and rums. If I have placed emphasis on the sensitising of Trinidadians and Tobagonians, and particularly the young and not so young, on the troubling issue of HIV/AIDS it is because the country and its people are under a growing threat from the horrific onward march of the disease. In turn, because of the polite on and off approach to dealing with the problem there are still many today, who are unaware of the danger it poses.

But not only must the Media be used to bring across to the broad mass of people the gathering HIV/AIDS storm from which people are immune only if they take preventive measures, but discussions should be held on a continuing basis in the nation’s schools. For except we blunt the threat, hundreds of thousands of peope in Trinidad and Tobago will die years before the chance to achieve their potential and make a contribution to the development of their country. The anti HIV-AIDS information assault is necessary if countless lives are to be saved. Parents, teachers and opinion leaders have a non too critical role to play. If earlier generations viewed running around as exciting and fun, however questionable, it must be driven home to today’s generation of impressionable young that it is suicidal. Older heads should desist from boasting to young people how they “ran around”, the number of partners they had, and how “easy” it all had been. The truth is that four, five six and more generations ago it simply was not right. Today, such tales merely encourage the young, and here I repeat myself, to adopt a suicidal path.

Let me tell you a story, a true story. A group to which I belong, and committed to the idea of developing in the young a sense of self worth, needed self esteem, sought to save a clearly misguided pre teen from life on the streets. We spoke to his mother, sought and obtained reports from his teacher. At times for weeks on end he would run away from home, from what he charged was a situation in which a close relative had insisted he was no longer welcome at the only home he ever knew. He would seek refuge in the Central Market, helping vendors push their hand propelled carts, and would sleep in the open or on occasion huddle in the shadows of goods left overnight at the market. One of my group spoke to him one Sunday morning shortly after he had journeyed to the Central Market off the Beetham Highway to purchase vegetables and what have you.  He convinced him to return to school and followed through with a request, conveyed by a third party, for his mother to speak with us. I met with the mother of the off and on street child and spent the better part of an hour speaking with her. For a part of the time this child of the streets was in on the discussion.

Group members decided, after it was discovered that the only clothes he had were on his back, that we would buy him some school clothes and school books. He turned out to school fairly regularly after that. However, about two months ago I enquired of him, only to be told that he had returned to the life of the street child. This week I again enquired. He had died two weeks before, I was advised, of AIDS - aged 10! But I have strayed. Government should initiate an ongoing information assault, employing in its armour, afternoon television and radio talk shows, as well as reaching out to schoolchildren in an attempt to save them from the horrors of HIV/AIDS. A factor in this campaign must be a reaching out to their parents and other adults. Teach them the benefits of positive parenting, even at the same time it teaches a growing number of adults to act with restraint and mature judgment. All of this in the hope as Plato has reminded us in his The Republic: “Those having torches will pass them on to others.”