...pass through the pores of the ocean

After the Symposium in Bangkok last week had finished, I spent an pleasant afternoon with Lia Sciortino. Old Indonesia AIDS hands will remember that she used to work for Ford Foundation here, responsible for reproductive health programs funded by Ford, including HIV. At that time (1995), I was volunteering with the Pelita Ilmu Foundation (YPI), helping to develop programs for support of people living with HIV in Jakarta. Ford agreed to fund the shelter we opened in the Tebet area of Jakarta, as well as the buddy service we developed.

We used to hold buddies meetings on Sunday mornings, and I remember one of the first times Lia joined one of those meetings. She always asked difficult questions, which made us all think. I also remember one meeting in the Ford office, where topic of condom promotion came up. She noted that even then, it was becoming increasingly difficult to talk about condoms, and it certainly hasn't gotten any easier since then.

Our 'friend' Prof. Dadang Hawari had started to promote the idea that latex condoms had pores in them that were big enough to let HIV through. No amount of theoretical or practical proof (such as inflating a condom, and seeing how long it took to deflate) was sufficient to convince him to change his tune. Probably he was not interested in inconvenient facts which did not support his agenda.

The Indonesian Medical Association (IDI) invited him to speak in a debate to defend his position, but he failed to attend. We failed then to come up with a strategy to address his misinformation campaign, and the current generation of condom activists are having no more success, proposing the 'same old same old' that failed a decade ago.

Lia left Ford in around 1998, and I hadn't met her since then. She went to Bangkok to work for the Rockefeller Foundation. But now she's teaching at a couple of universities in Bangkok, as sell as doing consultancy in Indonesia for the World Bank. Her Indonesian husband, O'ong Maryono, is a world expert on Pencak Silat Tradisional Betawi (a traditional Jakarta self-defence martial art - not sure I know how to describe it!), having written a couple of books on the subject.

Lia has also published an number of books, and she was kind enough to give me an inscribed copy of the Indonesian translation of 'CARE-takers of CURE: An Anthropological Study of Health Centre Nurses in Rural Central Java.' The Indonesian version, which was finally published in the middle of last year, is a bit snappier: 'Perawat Puskesmas di Antara Pengobatan & Perawatan.' I'm looking forward to finding time to sit down with this.

[One of advantages of having a unusual name such as Lia Sciortino or O'ong Maryono is that it's easy to find them on the internet. Try googling for Chris Green - you get 8,700,000 hits!]

Babé