Some double-sided tape, sheets of multi-coloured rice paper, safety pins, and a few condoms.
That's all it has taken one organization to overcome the societal barriers to discussing safe-sex in countries where it is otherwise taboo.
“It's magic,” said Frank DeRose, executive director of The Condom Project, which works globally to introduce and educate communities to life-saving information about condoms. The “condom pin art” program, which involves decorating clear packages of condoms with fancy paper and wearing them like brooches, has been a success in communities in India, Thailand, Burkina Faso and Senegal.
“You bring all these different people together around a table and not only are they making condoms into a piece of art, but people who would normally not even utter the word [condom] start talking about it.”
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The program has also been a success among delegates of all ages and backgrounds who are wearing the self-made colourful pins at the conference.
Mr. DeRose said the desensitization program has become so popular around the world that a group of nuns in Bolivia have adopted it, and so have a tribe of women in Ethiopia who are decorating the pins with small, local handicrafts and selling them.
“By wearing it on our chest, we're making it socially acceptable to wear a condom,” he said. “We're carriers of the message.”
Homosexuality in Uganda can mean a life-term in prison
Thousands of kilometres and an entire ocean away from home, Emmanuel Ndyanabo still looks over his shoulder to make sure the Ugandan police aren't coming after him.
He tries to laugh off the idea as silly, but the 22-year-old can't seem to shake the traumatic memory of being chased out of his native country earlier this month for wanting to attend the International AIDS Conference in Toronto.
“Everywhere I go, I'm scared they will be there,” he said.
Mr. Ndyanabo is gay, and being a homosexual in Uganda is a crime that comes with a life-term in prison. He has already been arrested for running a counselling service for HIV-positive kuchus (homosexuals) in Kampala and had his family blame him for his father's death last year. “Somehow, because I am gay, that killed my father, they say.”
So when he was granted a bursary to attend the Toronto conference earlier this month, he saw it as a long-awaited sign of hope to meet and speak with others like himself.
But at the airport, a customs official told him they were on the lookout for people wanting to attend this summit. “He [still] stamped my passport, looked at me and said, ‘I wish you luck. But do not come back if they [security] let you through.'”
Mr. Ndyanabo has applied for refugee status in Canada for fear of being persecuted if he returns to Uganda.
HIV as a weapon of war
About two dozen women huddled close to each other on couches and pillows in the conference's Global Village yesterday as Anne-Christine D'Adesky described a gruesome but often unreported aspect of how the HIV epidemic is spreading in sub-Saharan Africa.
The intentional use of HIV and rape as weapons of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, northern Uganda, Chad and Rwanda have left hundreds of thousands of women and children recovering from attempts to decimate their populations, said the executive director of San Francisco-based Women's Equity In Access to Care and Treatment (We-Act).
“The international community really needs to recognize and respond to the fact that rape and HIV are being used as weapons of war.”
Ms. D'Adesky said prevalence rates of HIV in women and children in war-torn northern Uganda, for example, are two to three times higher than the rest of the country, where upwards of 50 per cent of the country's soldiers are HIV-positive, she said.
“Here you have a situation where you have global fund money coming in and you have international plans being rolled out but we're not dealing with what we think is a major source of infection. ..... Mass rape and sexual violence are the real engines of the HIV epidemic and need to be addressed.”
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