"Keep your rosary off our ovaries"

It’s been a really busy day. As I mentioned earlier the themes of today were health and gender, and all the IPPF sessions were this morning. At the same time frantic negotiations at the NGO forum have been taking place to ensure the final youth recommendation are rights based and progressive.

Here is a flavour about what has been happening today:

Showcasing the Love, Life and HIV DVD: the video was shown this morning on the main stage of the Global Interactive Forum followed by some short interviews with three of the participants from the videos. The showing of the DVD video, only being partially in Spanish, didn’t have a huge audience (40 people or so) given that 85% of the people currently in the Global Interactive Forum are from Latin America. However, as soon as we began the interviews, we gathered a crowd of 150 people or so. The interviews were great as they clearly touched on some of the key issues faced by young people living with HIV such as:

“In Mexico people are not very friendly to people living with HIV – the stigma and discrimination is very strong. Please here do not know how to treat you and make you feel like you are a bad person because of your status.”
“Being an adolescent living with HIV was very difficult. At school, people didn’t want to talk to me or have anything to do with me. I just wanted to be a normal teenager
like they were. It was very difficult for me.”
“I have been living with HIV for four years and have decided that if I want, I can live a completely normal life. Living with HIV is not much different to living with any other illness.”

Legal Abortion Flash-mob: similar to yesterday we organised a short protest to turn some heads. This time the topic was on the right of women to a legal safe abortion. Whilst the idea was very simple (35 people walking through the conference centre in silence holding placards with various messages and statistics about unsafe abortion), it was an effective demonstration and landed up with a lot of media interest. By this I mean a bit of a scrum around the organiser Oriana (see picture to the left!). It will be interesting what the papers say tomorrow.

UNAIDS outcome framework: this afternoon I attended a session introducing the UNAIDS outcome framework 2009 – 2011. Whilst I was aware of this document, I hadn’t clocked its importance in terms of working with young people given that one of the 10 priority areas is “We can empower young people to protect themselves from HIV”. This is certainly something I’m going to be reading a bit more about over the next few weeks. To read more about it see http://data.unaids.org/pub/BaseDocument/2010/jc1713_joint_action_en.pdf

This is all the information at the moment as negotiations are still ongoing at the NGO forum and I don’t have the latest. I’ll write about this further tomorrow!