FIGHT THE FEAR.
A CONCEPT FOR PROGRAMS LINE UP.
by: DENNIS MOOT

HIV/AIDS is an issue that affects future generations fundamentally. The discourse on how to address it seems to have been pretty much left to health care and service providers to manage. No doubt, providing comprehensive health care to patient is the sure way, yet another effective way of fighting the disease is engaging all in ‘effective communication’ that does not only establish a medium through which issues are discusses but providing a therapeutic treatment to both affected and non-affected.

The non-existence of this ‘communication’ has only grown and strengthens fear and ignorance among citizens of this country.

? Fear of knowing one’s status
? Fear of being isolated
? Fear of being judged
? Fear of others finding out
? Fear of physical or emotional abuse
? Fear of disappointing loved ones fear of loving someone with HIV
? Fear of one’s future

Fear does nothing but keeps us silent.

Issues of HIV/AIDS is treated with such ‘HOLINESS’ that it is left to grow from strength to strength.

In this type of communication, we urge patients towards active participation in group activities, mobilizing self-determining tendencies in an attempt to settle with other that are not affected.
These activities comprises of those that engages discursions of the disease and most importantly, that which build self-determination. This brings to the question of self-realization. Self-realization thus requires from people (both affected and at risk) the acceptance of differences and the recognition that interpersonal difficulties are settled no by violence nor avoidance or withdrawal but by means of communication.

What needs to be done is to promote healthy therapeutic communication among these two groups of people, to realize the reality of their existence. What is now done is making people adjust to the situation the pandemic poses. On the surface, of course, adjustment may look like self-realization but under stress of avoidance, poverty, health, fear and other issues when group, family and social activities disintegrates, adjustment crumbles. Only those who are made to achieve a degree of self-realization can withstand adversity.

This leads to understanding the need for self development. Understanding this need, helps people to make wise choices, pursue a long term plan of living, become aware of the conditions needed for existence and substitute ones own experience for the decisions and values taken over from others in order to avoid errors and to perfect skills which were acquired earlier. Once the need for personal development becomes clearer, one loses the feelings of helplessness and become much aware that others are not all powerful and one is not entirely powerless. This lead to the discovery of the ‘can do spirit’ and to a certain extent the effective management of personal affairs.

Modern means of communication provides the needed platform with which issues of HIV/AIDS can be discoursed at the interpersonal level but remained untapped. What seems alarming is, even though effectiveness of billboard is realized to communicate across cultural lines less is done in the line of the fight against HIV/HIV. For this reason, Face Aids with the help of other will be embarking on a nationwide ‘billboard competition’ as a bid to correct this pitfall.

Hope for the future is to fight the fear; and in fighting the fear, we need to communicate while giving much attention to past experience. Without full utilization of the past experiences a human being cannot function appropriately (Jorgen R., Communication) and the fight against this faceless pandemic will continue to remain a mystery.