It's been a hectic week! We were asked by UNAIDS here to run three courses on preparing and submitting abstracts to the 9th International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP). Actually, UNAIDS is only funding; the ICAAP Local Organising Committee (LOC) is responsible for selection of the 150 participants, drawn from seven key groups: drug users; gay, lesbian, bisex and transex (LGBT); women; inter-faith; PLHIV; youth; and sex workers.
Monday and Tuesday we ran the first course. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that the selection had not been over successful in eliminating candidates who had really had very little of interest or value to present at the Congress. With only four mentors, it was quite a task to help and encourage all the participants to think of an interesting topic and commit it to paper. And of course, few were capable finally to translate the result into English, even more within the 200 word limitation. Google Translate came to our rescue for that; although the result is far from perfect (and sometimes quite amusing!), several of us found it did save time in preparing a first draft.
We heard a lot of stories, some of which I may report here later. Some were indeed only confessions or sharing. But in the end, the majority were able to submit their abstracts on-line (what a change this has made!), and although I suspect some will confuse the reviewers, others will definitely offer a broader community view. I guess if perhaps three quarters of the participants benefit, and half of those have abstracts accepted, it'll have been useful.
The next course, also in Jakarta, is planned for next week, although we still don't have a final list of participants. I'm always amazed at our ability to arrange flights for a large number of people from all over the country at very short notice; pity our poor travel agent!
The rest of the week was spent on prisons; more on that tomorrow...
Babé
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment