By Angela Singer
A leading international HIV/AIDS advocate will be the keynote speaker at the Association of Presbyterian Women’s AGM in May in Palmerston North.
Linda Bales, United States director of the Louise and Hugh Moore Population Project for the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society, will speak on HIV/AIDS, family planning and reproductive health, comprehensive sex education and domestic violence.
“I’ll be talking about HIV/AIDS and domestic violence because they are pandemics in the States and around the world”, Linda says.
Linda, who is on the United Methodist Global Aids Fund Committee, says she works, “at a number of levels with HIV and AIDS”.
“Our denomination set up its own AIDS fund about four years ago to mobilise millions of dollars to go to HIV/AIDS projects around the world”.
Linda would like to see the United Methodist Church have greater access on the ground to “some of these pots of money from the US government. We are trying to get some of the African bishops to mobilise themselves, to take advantage of this money going to Africa. They haven’t done a very good job of that yet”.
“We do mobilise people to be a prophetic voice,” Linda says. “We play the United Methodist card whenever we can, reminding politicians that there are 8 million United Methodists in the United States. Of course, not all agree with every position we take”.
The stigma attached to HIV/AIDS can make her work both difficult and slow, Linda says. “Because Aids has sexuality laced into it, we are slowly building momentum within the Church.”
The success of recent HIV/AIDS advocacy work, and her role within it, is something that greatly pleases Linda.
“I’ve put in a lot of effort over the last few months on a major HIV/AIDS Bill that was passed by the US Congress, signed by then-President Bush, and that will provide $48 billion over the next five years for HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria worldwide. To work on that was an honour, and it was very exciting.”
The funds will be administered by the Office of Global AIDS in the US government. However, actually getting the $48 billion to distribute may not be easy. Linda explains that just because the Bill has been signed does not mean that every year the money will be there. “It’s a two-part process called authorisation and appropriation; the Bill is an authorising one, so now every year Congress will have to vote how much money they are really going to spend on it.”
At this time, Linda will again be called on to utilise her passion and skills to advocate with government. “There will be for me a level of advocacy that happens around this each year for five years. We are in a very severe economic crisis but President Obama is very supportive of this Bill so I suspect that each year the budget request will be received well, but weighed against the US economy. For President Bush, this was one of his legacies”.
Linda thinks that ex-President Bush was influenced in his support for the Bill by a combination of trips to Africa to see the problem first hand; by Irish rock star and advocate Bono (who also visited Africa); and by the hundreds of AIDS organisations in the States that kept up sustained lobbying of the government.
“Another influence was the visit by then US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who went on a trip to Africa with Bono and his heart was, as we would say in Methodism, strangely warmed. He was a converted soul, so that helped a lot too,” Linda says.
The APW has produced a brochure outlining the challenges HIV/AIDS poses for women. This was distributed in the December issue of Spanz; you can order more free copies by emailing info@presbyterian.org.nz.