"O My Broher Student, What Do You Know About AIDS?"
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Without enough resources, the government has reached a compromise between the need for comprehensive AIDS testing and the need to be economical: at the end of every day, all the blood samples from the Center are mixed together in one big pot, and a single AIDS test is performed on the big pot. In the unlikely event that the test registers positive, the extremely efficient internal security apparatus springs into action – aided by those thousands of photographs – to haul every person who got his AIDS test that day back to the Center to be retested, this time on an individual basis.
I leave it to the experts to decide the merits of this practice – about which, to be fair, I was only informed through hearsay. Many other examples make it clear to me, however, that public health officials in Syria accomplish their admittedly modest goals with surprising efficacy, given the paucity of their resources. This is largely accomplished because, in Syria, public health is seen largely as a political goal rather than a social one.
My Arabic pamphlet, which is entitled “O My Brother Student, What Do You Know About AIDS?” begins in the following way: “ There is no doubt that you’ve heard or read about the disease called AIDS, which was discovered for the first time in America in 1981, and which spread in some years to every corner of the world, to the extent that no country has avoided it. And despite the fact that, in the beginning, AIDS was restricted to a cadre of gay men in a number of American cities, the disease now threatens every individual and every group and every nation throughout the world.”
True, for the most part – perhaps astonishingly so, considering the pamphlet’s source. But the paragraph also carries a political subtext. It succeeds in identifying America as the epicenter of AIDS. It succeeds in claiming that American inattention and inaction led to the disease’s expansion beyond US borders. And it succeeds in pointing the finger at America’s gay community, implying both that homosexuals are to blame for the epidemic and that America is to blame for its tolerance of homosexuals and lack of social mores.Kyan Safavi is a freshman in Berkeley College.