CARIBBEAN STUDENTS JOIN ROTARY IN WAR ON HIV/AIDS

More than 150 secondary school students from seven Caribbean countries will voice the concern of the Region’s youths for the need for all people with HIV/AIDS, regardless of income, to be able to access anti-retroviral therapy, when they debate the issue at the Rotary Club of Central Port-of-Spain’s Model United Nations Assembly (MUNA) to be held in Trinidad in march. The subject, always topical, “Right of Universal Access to Anti-Retroviral Therapy for all living with HIV/AIDS,” is of specific interest not only to the Caribbean and the rest of the Third World, but internationally. No individual, be he or she from a wealthy, middle income or poor country should be under the sentence of death from any problem or disease because medication remains out of his reach for economic reasons. In the end the ongoing battle has to be on two fronts - how to encourage people, especially the young, to change their lifestyles, and for those who become casualties in the HIV/AIDS battle, the recognition of the need to have them access drugs which will prolong their lives.

Rotary International, under whose continuously expanding umbrella all Rotary Clubs fall, took the crucial decision that Rotary Clubs, internationally, should be actively involved during the current Rotary Year in projects (each) with an HIV/AIDS awareness and support theme. Neither Rotary International nor the Rotary Club of Central Port-of-Spain, clearly, is discounting or has discounted the relatively huge sums spent by pharmaceutical companies in creating these drugs. But there is the understandable insistence by both that unless anti-retroviral therapy can be accessed by all living with HIV/AIDS then millions of people the world over, many at the height of their youth and productivity, will die too early and deny their countries the right of their scholarship and of their skills. Realistically, the developed countries will be ultimately affected, because they will no longer be able to draw in large numbers as in the past from the profitable-to-them reservoir of talented, skilled and highly motivated young Third World people, traditionally attracted by the lure of opportunities and benefits not available in their own lands.

Next year’s MUNA, the Rotary Club’s seventh, will represent the first time that Caribbean students will come together at one regional forum to debate strategies they hope will inhibit the dreaded scourge of AIDS which has killed so many of the Region’s young people. The principal in the organising of the upcoming MUNA, Lara Quentral-Thomas, Chairperson of the Rotary Club of Central Port-of- Spain’s International Service Committee, is herself the Managing Director of a Human Resources Recruitment Agency, Regency Recruitment. As such she is better positioned than most, because of her field, to appreciate the critical importance of the need of the Caribbean, in particular, to maintain and expand their human resources. Scores of students from Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Guyana, Grenada and Bequia have already confirmed acceptance of the request by the Rotary Club of Central Port-of- Spain to participate in the MUNA, while Suriname, St. Lucia and St. Vincent have indicated strong interest and are expected to formalise this shortly.

The Rotary Club does not stand alone. The National AIDS Co-ordinating Committee is sponsoring the Model United Nations Assembly, while the Ministry of Education is actively involved. In turn, several teachers have signified they will be attending briefing sessions this Saturday (December 4). In addition, Caribbean students participating in the MUNA have been and are being supplied with material on HIV/AIDS, research and anti-retroviral therapy to better position them for the debate. The MUNA will be conducted along the lines of a regular United Nations Assembly, with participants “representing” different countries. Should past MUNAs be a guide, then a large number of the students —described as delegates — will attend the Model UN Assembly in the traditional dress of the individual nations they will “represent”. In turn, diplomats of foreign missions accredited to Trinidad and Tobago, as well as key personnel of the United National Information Centre will be providing literature and assistance to the young delegates.

The importance of the forthcoming MUNA lies not merely in the subject to be debated, but the fact that a sizeable number of young people will be sensitised to the dangers offered by HIV/AIDS and the need for the right to argue for suitable anti-retroviral therapy. Regrettably, in 2001, almost a quarter of a century since the virus and disease were identified, and even with unrelenting, indeed increasing attempts by Governments throughout the Region to alert populations to the dangers involved, there still remain literally hundreds of thousands of young and mature people committed to reckless lifestyles. Is it that the messages are not reaching them and need to be repeated ad nauseam, or is it that despite all the evidence there are those who refuse to believe that their lifestyles increasingly make them targets for HIV/AIDS? Or worse, do they believe that HIV/AIDS despite their clearly irrational behaviour will pass them by?

Hopefully, at the end of the two-day MUNA, which will take place at the Cascadia Hotel, St. Anns, on March 12 and 13 the Rotary Club of Central Port-of-Spain’s efforts would have produced hundreds of disciples, including students attending the Assembly as observers, who will go out and seek to convert those who today stubbornly refuse to accept their own vulnerability. And who, in seeking the conversion of others will be able to successfully argue MUNA’s thrust of the “Right of Universal Access to Anti-Retroviral Therapy for all living with HIV/AIDS”. Not only the wealthy should have the right to arrest HIV/AIDS and/or the right to have their lives extended.

Nonetheless, Rotary International and the Rotary Club of Central Port-of- Spain can do so much. The unconvinced play the dangerous and all too often fatal game of Russian Roulette, when they insist on having multi-partner instead of single partner sexual relationships. They make a mockery of the “Right of Universal Access...”, a resolution which Brazil originally had proposed at a meeting of the United Nations some years ago. In the process the multi-partnership unfortunates compromise another significant right, their own right to live without HIV/AIDS.