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HIV/AIDS

14 December 2005, 18:00 PM
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
By Angela Robinson The British School in Dhaka, Dhanmondi
14 December 2005, 18:00 PM
Thank you for your good coverage of the HIV/AIDS issue but whatever is said by the representatives of (is it?) 400 organisations trying to help Bangladesh with this issue in one way or another, the picture is very depressing. The uncomfortable fact is that there are just too many people who are apparently determined that young people (or at least their young people!) should NOT be informed about anything to do with Adolescent Reproductive Health and until young people know the basics, they do not have the language, the confidence or the opportunities to be able to discuss the issues at all. Ignorance thus makes them highly vulnerable. The demand that somebody, somewhere, should be informing people about HIV/AIDS is like hearing demands for the occupation of a flat on the 3rd floor of a house whose foundations have not been built!

An excellent NGO, funded from overseas (where else?) has produced some really excellent resources on Adolescent Reproductive Health DVDs, videos, booklets, teachers' books, cartoon books - the lot - and in both Bengali and English. They are so Bangladesh-appropriate that one shakes one's head at the effort to imagine anyone who might protest. Teachers who have seen the material consider it excellent and most laugh and say they wish they had seen it when they were young! The resources have been produced, with great professionalism, dedication and respect for the culture - and they are available. I was shown a huge list of schools that said they would use them. The government ordered hundreds of thousands of copies for use in schools.

However, when, after a lot of work in my school by a small group of enthusiasts, we requested Management for the go-ahead, we did not receive it - for the simple reason that our contacts in high places had announced, privately but confidently, that these resources would never be actually used, they would just gather dust on the shelves, and that they had only been ordered to keep on the right side of the prestigious donors and, besides, it was "Foreigners telling us what to do!"

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Are we surprised that donors get fed up with us? Who actually cares about the need of our children to know so that they can look after themselves and one another when parents and teachers are no longer around? We need more and not less authority in the Ministry of Education to demand that the prejudices of some (but not all) are gently but firmly stopped from keeping children in ignorance, fear and danger.