Are You Kidding Me?
Are You Kidding Me?
What else can one say when reading this?
WELAMASONGA, Tanzania (Reuters) - With billions of dollars pouring in to fight Africa’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, Tanzanian AIDS counselor Gandencia Bazil has a simple request.
“We need a bicycle,” said Bazil, who heads the AIDS committee in this village near Lake Victoria, an area where an estimated 12 percent of people are infected with HIV.
“With a bicycle we could reach more people with health messages. But we cannot afford even that,” said Bazil, as other members of her committee nodded grimly following a meeting in a makeshift shelter near the village center.
“We are not getting the support we need.”
Welamasonga’s predicament is repeated across Africa, where despite a huge jump in overseas assistance and government AIDS budgets, the cash earmarked to fight the epidemic is often not making it to the desperate people who need it most….
The scale of the AIDS crisis in Africa — where some 26 million people are infected with HIV, more than 2 million died of AIDS in 2005 and well over 12 million children have lost one or both parents to the disease — still dwarfs the assistance being made available.
Nevertheless, both governments and United Nations’ agencies, which spent years fighting to raise AIDS funding, are now battling to develop new strategies to spend it.
“We all need to begin thinking out of the box,” Peter Piot, executive director of the United Nations’ AIDS agency UNAIDS, said during a recent inspection trip to Tanzania where he was often asked why cash was not reaching grassroots groups.
“Stopping the AIDS epidemic is going to require more than just a medical approach.”
Begin thinking outside of the box? Can you believe this crap? While the UN tries to learn to think outside the box, millions of Africans are getting buried in pine boxes. Maybe I should be more understanding. It’s hard to eradicate sexually transmitted diseases, when you’re running your own Third World escort service:
United Nations — Sexual abuse charges against U.N. peacekeepers remain unacceptably high because of “a culture of dismissiveness,” a senior U.N. diplomat told the Security Council February 23….
U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, president of the Security Council for the month of February, called for the meeting to review the problem of sexual exploitation and abuse in peacekeeping missions, which he calls “one of the greatest stains on U.N. history.” [Did he really say stains? –ed]
“I think it is important to keep the spotlight on the difficulties posed by this unacceptable practice. I was encouraged by the fact there was unanimous support in the council for increasing our efforts to prevent this in the first place and to prosecute it when it does occur,” Bolton told journalists after the public meeting.
“It is absolutely unacceptable that horrific crimes of sexual abuse and exploitation have been committed by U.N. peacekeepers against individuals they have been assigned to protect,” Bolton said. He added that it is the “moral and ethical responsibility” of the United Nations and member governments to prevent such crimes.
“The ‘boys will be boys’ attitude, which too long pervaded peacekeeping operations, must correctly be met with a zero-tolerance policy,” he said.
The United Nations began investigating charges of sexual exploitation by peacekeepers two years ago after reports of abuse surfaced in the Democratic Republic of Congo and West Africa. Charges include rape and enticing hungry children and women with food and money in exchange for sex.
They should call it the Ewww-nited Nations.