Personalising the pandemic
I didn’t know what awaited me when I was asked to facilitate a two-week training course called “Politics of HIV/AIDS Healthcare” on behalf of the Southern African Media Training Trust (NSJ). I came away from the course exhausted, but challenged and inspired by the 18 journalists from around the region who shared in this experience with me.
On the first day of the course the participants laid out their expectations for it: they wanted more knowledge; an opportunity to address the kinds of challenges that the story of HIV/AIDS presents; they wanted to explore how journalists report on HIV; and they wanted to find new, innovative ways of telling the stories of HIV/AIDS.
But one expectation stood out for me: they wanted to “personalise the pandemic”: to understand HIV/AIDS from a personal perspective and to use this understanding to write about the issue more meaningfully.
We didn’t know it then, but that expectation would be exceeded beyond anything we could have envisioned on that first day.
I then asked each member of the group to relate their motivation for being on the course and their experiences of HIV/AIDS personally and professionally.
As we went around the table it struck me that not one participant talked about how HIV/AIDS affected them personally, or their families, communities, friends, lovers. Afterwards, I wondered why. Perhaps it was because it was the first day. Perhaps it was because none of us were personally affected by the epidemic. Perhaps it was because too often journalists tend to think of HIV/AIDS being “out there” - something we research and write about, but not something that actually lives inside our newsrooms or inside us.
A case in point is that we don’t seem to have many journalists who are publicly HIV-positive in our region. Off the top of my head I can only think of Lucky Mazibuko of the Sowetan or the Namibian journalist David Lush.
But it is crazy to think that in 2005, in a region that has felt the impact of HIV/AIDS more than any other in the world, that we remain unaffected by the virus. The reality of the pandemic in this region demands that we are affected. As we got to know each other over the next two weeks, as the knots loosened and this reality began to unfold, this became increasingly evident.
There’s the silence and stigma in K’s newsroom, precipitated by the AIDS-related death of her colleague. K tried to talk about it openly but was told to keep quiet by her editor. There’s B, who feels terrible guilt over the death of his brother, just a few weeks back: he died of an AIDS-related illness. B has many questions - why did his brother stay silent about his status until he was on his deathbed? Could B have done more? What could he have done under the circumstances? R wanted to pass the information about ARVs that she had learnt onto her sister…
Everyone recognised the lack of workplace and editorial policies on HIV/AIDS in our media organisations.
And then there was H, a participant from South Africa . He’s just one of those people you take to instantly. Charming, glowing with confidence and intelligence, a journalist with a lot of potential. H defies every stereotype in the book about people living with HIV/AIDS. When he took his pillbox out of his bag on the fourth day, when we were discussing ARVs, and said something like, “Well you can all look at mine if you like,” the other participants couldn’t believe it.
Over the next week, he did more to challenge people’s preconceptions and stereotypes about HIV/AIDS than if I had stood there day in and day out talking up a storm. Just by being there.
More and more our stories about ourselves and the worlds we inhabit were woven into the sessions - it was no longer about the world “out there” but the world “in here”.
By the end of the course, we all felt that we had exceeded the expectation to “personalise the pandemic” in our lives and in our work. We realised that if we could achieve this, then we would begin to find new angles and interesting, creative ways to write about HIV/AIDS.
This is a challenge I issue to all of us who produce journalistic work on HIV/AIDS. We all need to attempt what was achieved in this course: we need to talk about HIV/AIDS openly in our own lives, to understand its impact on us as people, and by doing so, begin to address it in our work.
We all complain that audiences are bored of HIV/AIDS. They’re not bored of the issue, they’re bored of seeing the same tired formulas reproduced again and again in HIV/AIDS stories. If every journalist that cares about this particular story could “personalise the pandemic”, we’d not only be better professionals, but also perhaps we’ve got a shot at being better people. - Natalie Ridgard