China Goes to Bali
The sun is setting over the palm trees, and we're finishing up a wonderful, exhilirating and intense week in Bali for the International Conference on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP-9). For the first time, Asia Catalyst supported a delegation of 9 Chinese AIDS activists, provided translation throughout, and hosted events that brought Chinese and other Asian activists together at meetings, at workshops, and at a beach barbecue party under the stars (do you hate us yet?).
Chinese NGO Delegation - To support the capacity development of the grassroots Chinese AIDS NGO movement, Asia Catalyst assisted 9 AIDS activists to attend, including representatives of Aizhixing Health Education Institute, Dongzhen Human Rights Education and Action Center, Ark of Love, and Aibai. Two members of the group assisted the others with translation, as did four Asia Catalyst staff and volunteers. While some Chinese NGOs have recently been mired in conflict over representation on China's Country Coordinating Mechanism for the Global Fund, it was inspiring to see this group of AIDS activists eating together, living together, working together and helping one another to navigate the conference.
Presentations, Reservations and Translations - Often at international conferences, Chinese AIDS activists who lack strong English skills wind up sidelined and marginalized. Asia Catalyst provided help in the months leading up to ICAAP to members of the Chinese delegation in raising funds for and booking travel, and we helped to translate the paper presentations and poster presentations at the conference. Tian Xi and Xu Haibo were both attending their first international conferences, and both gave memorable and courageous oral presentations on legal and human rights issues in China's response to the AIDS epidemic. Li Man, also at her first international conference, gave a poster presentation on her work with sex workers in Yunnan. These sessions sparked a great deal of interest from the audience. Chinese AIDs activists also had questions and comments of their own for speakers from the UN, the Gates Foundation, and others. (Our next blog will summarize what Chinese AIDS activists had to say at ICAAP.) And Asia Catalyst staff had our own oral and poster presentations, on children's rights and media issues.
NGO Barbecue Party on the Beach - As several of the Chinese AIDS activists put it, "All these Asian AIDS NGOs seem to know each other really well, but the Chinese groups don't know any of them". To help break down the barriers and help Chinese get to know their counterparts, Asia Catalyst joined with Indonesian drug user human rights group IKON Bali to host a barbecue party on Jimbaran beach for about 100 AIDS activists, IDU and sex worker advocates, donors, and their friends. Over skewers of grilled seafood, bottles of Bintang and group singing for a Cambodian and Chinese AIDS activist who both happened to be celebrating birthdays this week, the group connected in multiple languages.
Advocacy - Asia Catalyst also hosted a satellite session at ICAAP, "Restrictions on AIDS NGOs in Asia." The session followed our open letter to UNAIDS chief Michel Sidibe signed by 30 NGOs on the chronic and widespread problems faced by grassroots AIDS NGOs in many countries around the region. AIDS advocates from PT Foundation (Malaysia), Korsang (Cambodia), and Dongzhen (China) spoke about restrictions on everything from registering an NGO, to publishing materials, to being evicted from offices, to police harassment some activists face while doing outreach to sex worker and drug user communities in the region. As Holly Bradford from Korsang put it, "It helps just to know we're not alone." We agreed to form a coalition that will join in advocating for the rights of AIDS activists and frontline NGOs in Asia. Some groups also expressed interest in sharing their experiences in getting human rights training to staff, volunteers and the communities we serve.
Looking Forward - In many ways, ICAAP was a trial run for us as we consider the prospect of coordinating a delegation from China to the International AIDS Conference in 2010. International meetings are a big commitment for a tiny group like ours (we have one full-time and three part-time staff). To be frank, this was especially true in the case of ICAAP in Bali, where despite high registration fees, the bureaucratic snafus by the conference coordinating agency in Jakarta were so numerous that they almost merit a blog entry of their own. Our volunteers and part-time staff spent many hours attempting to sort out everything from messed-up hotel bookings, to lost per diem allowances, to mistaken charges to our accounts, and more. On one memorable occasion, we went to the airport to meet scholarship recipients after midnight, and took them to their hotel, to find that the hotel had no record of their reservation - because in their wisdom, the ICAAP staff had changed their hotel bookings without notifying the scholars (or us). It's things like this that make taking a delegation to a big international meeting a quite serious investment of time and resources - time that could be spent doing our other work in Asia.
At the same time, for grassroots Chinese groups, meetings like ICAAP are a truly rare opportunity to transcend local barriers and censorship, connect with new peers, learn about different strategies, and make new voices heard on the global stage. So, here we go Vienna (maybe after a quick nap on the beach).
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