Two CUPE members are in Mexico City this week for AIDS 2008. Roger Procyk, of the National Aboriginal Council, shares his experiences and impressions of the conference.
Aug 2/08 - Rough ride to Ontario from the ‘Peg and we were still
bouncing around as we came in to land at Toronto’s Pearson Airport.
Aug 3/08 - The ride to Mexico City left on time. I met colleague
Gerry Lavallee, co-chair of CUPE’s Pink Triangle Committee, on the
plane. We doubled up when we disembarked at the Benito Juarez airport
and shared a cab into the city to the Camino Real Hotel (Royal Highway
Hotel).
We doubled on another cab after breakfast – which included, for
me, café con leche. They bring a cup of hot black coffee with a small
pitcher of hot milk on the side. You mix it yourself. Muy excelente!
I then went to catch a bus to my first Mexico AIDS Conference tour.
The bus took us to another part of the city to a modest building
where the 2nd story program called La Red Mexicana is housed. The
organization is a network of people living with HIV/AIDS whose main
focus is capacity building for clients and their families and networks.
They have 4 or 5 rooms from which 12 staff and 30 volunteers run a
education,
counselling, STI and HIV testing service much like 9 Circles Community Health Centre in Winnipeg. They have a medicine bank
where they collect unused medications (from clients who change regimes
or develop resistances, etc.) and provide these to numerous other
clients who need them.
It was officially announced at this
conference opening that Mexico has “Universal Access” to HIV drugs.
While that might sound good at the press conference and strike the
right political tone, it has more substance as an ideal than as a
reality – otherwise this organization would not be running an HIV meds
bank to serve the hundreds that it does.
According to the staff, which proudly includes PHAs, their
clientele are mostly men. They pegged the number of positive
individuals in Mexico at about 162,000 out of a total population for
the country of 110 million.