Out of sight, out of mind
PAPUA New Guineans with the AIDS virus are being dumped outside
the Angau Memorial Hospital Day Care Centre. And the Morobe Provincial
AIDS Council chairman says this is happening because nobody is
providing care, treatment or support. We are convinced that Dr
Rendi Moke is correct in his assessment.
It is very much easier to invest money, expertise and community
support in attempts to stop people acquiring AIDS than it is to
deal with their skeletal bodies, their incontinence, their mental
delusions and the agony of a slow and certain death.
There is nothing nice about dying of AIDS. It isn’t the
kind of disease where patients die with dignity, cushioned with
pillows and surrounded by anguished relatives and friends. It
is a harrowing death.
In our country it’s a death often punctuated with terrible
fits of coughing, lumps of sputum, vomiting and fever, and endlessly
soiled laplaps and sleeping mats.
The dying person may be little more than a skeleton, with bones
prodding at the too-taut skin.
Or perhaps the victim is a child, eyes too big for the wasted
face, a body defined by elbows and knees.
How can the victim understand the fate that is overwhelming
it? And why will nobody meet that child’s uncomprehending
glance, that gaze devoid of guilt or guile? Because “no-one
is providing care, treatment and support”. Most of us have
washed our hands of AIDS victims.
We will willingly attend meetings addressed by experts who tell
us a thousand ways in which we can help carry the anti-AIDS message
to our communities, and protect our own families.
We will speak out, address meetings, make our support public,
and show our dedication and commitment to the prevention of this
disease. But we will not sit by the hour beside the young woman
who repeatedly drenches herself in her own urine.
We will not even go to the village where she lies, if she is
fortunate enough to have relatives who will accept her on sufferance.
We will not lift a finger to assist the young AIDS victim who
has been deliberately burned and tortured, who has been denied
food and water, and who has been thrown into the haus pik at the
end of the village, the better to die. In fact, we will not tolerate
even the sense of their presence in our environment.
Far better, we tell ourselves, to dump them outside a hospital
day care centre – after all, that’s the medical officers
job, that’s what they’re paid to do, and they should
know how to handle these people.
And of course, we tell ourselves, these days there’s medicine
for AIDS, so it isn’t as bad as it used to be back at the
beginning of this sickness.
That’s the kind of cocoon of comfortable misinformation
that makes murderers of us all, for we willingly accept that which
is part truth, preferring the comfort of its false re-assurance,
rather than the bleak realities that we will do everything within
our power to ignore, to avoid, and to flee from.
There is no AIDS orphanage in PNG. But there are dozens of known
AIDS orphans, and many more unidentified within our urban centres
and our rural villages.
Month after month, and now year after year, Tessie Soi and the
Friends organisation gathers the pathetic little bodies from the
morgue, creates coffins for them, and buries them un-mourned and
unwanted at the capital’s 9 Mile cemetery.
Yes, there are some AIDS drop-in centres in our country. But
many of those centres are under-utilised, monuments to well-meaning
churches and community groups, a nervous and impersonal out-reach
to a grim problem.
They’re not used much because AIDS victims don’t
even know of their existence. They know nothing of
the services and contacts and very real comfort they can provide.
The communication links that should place them among the best-known
public contacts in town simply don’t exist. And at the other
end of the scale, there are no purpose-built, professionally staffed
AIDS wards in any of our hospitals.
The message to the AIDS sufferer is crystal clear.
Please go away – and die.
Brian Haill
President,
The Australian AIDS Fund Inc.,
PO Box 1347,
Frankston, VIC, 3199
Australia
Email: bhaill@bigpond.net.au
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