Use any language you choose

An E-mail from Ken in Australia reminded me that it was time I put a bit of effort into the English language part of the Spiritia web site. Naturally our first priority is to providing clear information for people in Indonesia in their own language. But a secondary objective, similar to the primary one of this blog, is to provide a picture of the state of the HIV epidemic in Indonesia for outsiders who don't speak Indonesian. In addition, sadly there are those working in the AIDS or associated field here whose knowledge of Indonesian (to put it politely) is somewhat limited. We hoped also to help them.

But it's been some time since I had any feedback on the English part, so, well, out of sight, out of mind. I'd even forgotten what information was offered. But Ken, who has an Indonesian partner, and works as an HIV clinical nurse specialist in Sydney, reported that he had been working with an Indonesian student with HIV and TB. This guy is due to return to Indonesia next year, and Ken was trying to find out about treatment options here. And he couldn't find anything useful on our site.

He was right. As those of you who have (perhaps) visited the site will have seen, we'd provided a general article on AIDS in Indonesia, but nothing specific on care, support and treatment (CST). And this information is certainly needed to support our objective of informing outsiders about the situation here.

So this morning, I sat down and wrote this up. I've just uploaded the result Care, Support & Treatment for PLHIV in Indonesia. If you have time and inclination, do take a look and let me know if I've left anything out. It is naturally a bit subjective, but I hope it is reasonably balanced.

Now what else do we need? I'm thinking that there ought to be an article on peer support in Indonesia: how it developed, and where it now stands. I think we've pioneered some interesting approaches, which might be of interest to others. Any other ideas?

Babé