WORLD AIDS Day will be marked around the globe in 11 days time.
The day represents an outstanding opportunity for Papua New Guineans to address a lengthy agenda.
The red ribbon has become the international symbol of World AIDS Day and is now familiar to tens of millions throughout the world.
Let’s light up PNG with a sea of red to mark the day in our country.
What other matters should be on our World AIDS Day agenda?
A little more public honesty and a little more effort to diminish the hatred and stigma directed against AIDS victims.
If we are honest, we will admit that many of us simply don’t want to know about AIDS or the thousands of our countrymen and women whose lives it has devastated.
We isolate ourselves.
It’s nothing to do with us.
And we continue to sit in our smug little cocoons, ignoring both the threat and the very real suffering outside our doors.
Until and unless AIDS slips into our private world, unnoticed and unannounced.
Unless we suddenly find that our wife or husband has become an AIDS victim.
Unless we make the horrifying discovery, on a routine visit to the doctor, that we are another AIDS victim.
So that’s the second agenda item.
Many of us, theoretically the majority, are practising Christians.
We attend our crowded churches faithfully every Sunday, we poke some coins into the offertory box and we chorus “hallelujah” with the best of them.
There’s a cosy sense of comfort – the familiar texts displayed near the altar, the vestments of the religious, perhaps a keyboard or harmonium to echo the long-remembered notes of familiar hymns.
And not a word from the pulpit about AIDS.
No attempt to guide the flock of the faithful in their struggle to come to terms with dealing with AIDS victims at work or at home.
Nothing to tell the congregation that it is pagan nonsense to suggest that AIDS is God’s dreadful punishment upon an immoral people.
No attempt to denounce the savage behaviour that still takes place in many of our villages when an AIDS victim is discovered.
No – in the majority of churches – AIDS does not rate a mention.
It’s not a nice subject for a polite sermon.
That’s blatant hypocrisy, and that’s the third of our agenda items.
Then there are certain public and non-government organisations.
Funded most generously by overseas friends of PNG, these organisations often do not lack money.
But overseas officials in some of these bodies maintain an uninvolved approach to their work.
They are less interested in the sufferings of AIDS victims than in the numbers within the country, the ways in which funds can be used and the neat and orderly book entries that will form the basis of the annual report to their foreign affairs and health departments.
Confronted with the skeletal body of the woman who has been bundled into the village pig house to die, these people would turn tail and flee. There’s a big gulf between statistics of the dead and the dying and the reality in the field.
So that’s another line in our agenda – just a little more humanity, a little less of the superior western attitudes and a lot less of the hard-to-miss implication that the victims are always, somehow, responsible for destroying their own lives.
We’ve left the most important agenda item to last – the need to show genuine affection and love to AIDS sufferers.
There’s a jingle on air at the moment – perhaps you’ve heard it?
It will never win an MTV award but it carries the line: “Family forever; AIDS – no never”, and that’s a valid point.
We’ve seen at first hand far too many AIDS sufferers who have had to bear the terrible indignities heaped upon them by their angry spouses, their own children and other members of their families.
The laws to protect these people are well and truly on the statute books.
The humanity to translate those laws into action is often sadly lacking.
We must approach both the disease and its victims with understanding and Christian love.
For AIDS is a national problem.