Note: This post appeared over at Elizabeth Pisani’s new blog, “Portrait Indonesia”. “Wisdom of Whores” is still on hiatus as she travels Indonesia in preparation for her new book, but we thought that WOW readers might appreciate this particular post. If you’ve not done so already, please do go over to Portrait Indonesia and have a look around. You can get the RSS / Atom feed here.

AIDS prevention poster in Southeastern Maluku, 2011

I have a collection of daft AIDS posters going back years, but I’m glad to say they are getting harder to find. This one, in Saumlaki, the main town in the remote Tanimbar islands, was thus a great find. The headline reads: AIDS: there’s not yet any cure! On the right is this helpful information:

AIDS!!!
You can’t avoid it by:

• Choosing your sex partners on the basis of their appearance
• Drinking/injecting antibiotics, alcohol, or herbal medicine before and after having sex
• Washing your sex organs after having sex

Some, including the South African president Thabo Mbeki and uber-philanthropist Bill Gates would take issue with the last point. I, of course, would take partial issue with the second — you can avoid AIDS by taking medicine, you just can’t avoid HIV that way. But the most egregious part of this ad is the illustration.The population of Tanimbar is largely Melanesian. Overwhelmingly the highest HIV risk for them is the sex they might have on their frequent money-spinning travels to neighbouring Papua. Indonesian Papau, rich in minerals, forests and much else, is swimming in cash. It is also swimming in HIV; it’s epidemic looks more like East Africa 15 years ago than it does like any other part of Indonesia today. And it is populated not by pointy-nosed tourists with straight blonde hair but with flat-nosed Papuans with crinkly black hair.

Most AIDS posters are pretty useless, in my opinion. But this poster associates HIV with Western tourists slow-dancing under the palm trees — an “other” that most people here will never come across, while saying nothing about commercial sex in high risk areas (Papua, but also with the local transgender (or waria) population). Those are very real risks that many certainly do face, at least if Astuti, one of the latter, is to be believed. She excused herself early from a grilled fish dinner because her phone rang. Not her Blackberry, that’s for friends and family, but her “HP selinkungan” (cheating phone). In Tanimbar from neighbouring Kei for around a year, she hasn’t had a day without clients. And though she has helped distribute condoms and promote testing in other cities around Indonesia (in some of which one transgender sex worker in three is infected with HIV), she’s seen no sign of an HIV prevention programme in Tanimbar. By maintaining the fiction that something is being done about HIV prevention in Tanimbar, this poster is a lot worse than useless. It is actively dangerous.

And from my best side:

Thanks to dkj for driving me to them.

Off-topic but on memory: 20 years ago today I was in Tiananmen Square, reporting for Reuters on the chaos that was the student movement. It was an odd time — sweaty, rank-smelling but rather jolly. Erica’s photo captures rather well the unbridled hubris and optimism of the students, right up to the last day or two of their protest. It wasn’t until the evening of June 3rd that things got really nasty. By midnight, things were nasty enough that most people, students and foreign journalists alike, had left the square. I stayed there with a colleague, Graham Earnshaw, until the tanks came in at dawn. Or at least I think I did. Graham’s memory of what happened is rather different.

When I first became aware of the difference, I got in touch with several of the old muckers who were in and around the Square with me. What if we all wrote down now what we remember of that night, then compared notes? No-one was up for it. I guess everyone was frightened about the tricks memory can play — and indeed it was that, more than the actual events in Tiananmen Square, that were the subject of the piece I wrote in Granta recently. (pdf) In the last couple of weeks, however, several of my friends and colleagues have sent me their version of events (including this nice piece from Andy Roche.)

In the intervening years, I’ve had the opportunity of working closely with the Chinese government. My colleagues in the Ministry of Health were young, dynamic, well-trained. Though many were from the post-Tiananmen generation, all were aware of what happened, and many were interested in discussing the implications two decades on. Attending mock press conferences to prepare for the release of controversial HIV estimates (inevitably and somewhat ironically, I took the role of the Rotweiler foreign correspondent) I find it hard to believe that the higher-ups could have allowed Tiananmen to happen. And I find it equally baffling that they are trying, still, to suppress discussion of events which were never a real threat to Party rule, and which in the eyes of most of the population belong to a distant past. The student leaders of yesteryear were not terribly coherent in their demands, but the central item of their agenda — corruption within the Communist Party — remains the major threat to that Party’s survival. If the old men sitting sclerotically atop the Politburo were to spend less time blocking web-sites and more time fighting corruption, they’d have little to worry about.

Other people get spam e-mails offering them all night erections and a life free of depression. I get offered syphilis diagnostic kits and statistical analysis software. And now, viral art. The sculpture pictured above landed in my in-box from Bioetch — no, that’s not a typo. And I’m passing on to you the chance to buy a drug-attacks-virus paperweight at the discount price of US$ 69.95. With this lyrical description:

“We have used the highest quality green laser to 3D-engrave the HIV-1 protease complexed with indinavir within an optically pure crystal block (2″ x 2″ x 3.1″). The protease structure is rendered using a ribbon diagram and the indinavir structure is offset from the enzyme using a ball-and-stick model. The result is a perfect tool to view the beauty of this enzyme-drug interaction. It also makes a great gift or stylish decoration for your office or desk.”

Hurry. The e-mail tells me there are only 8 left.

So a Russian girl is worth twice as much as a girl from north China, huh? And Malaysian girls are discounted fairly heavily. There are 460 million young adult women in China. That’s 60 times more “girls” that you’ll find in Malaysia (even if you count the Chinese Malaysians). My rudimentary understanding of economics suggests the scarcer commodity should sell for more. Perhaps some of our economist friends over at Marginal Revolution could explain what’s going on before we become Unspun or propmt Ranting from those who know the true value of cewek Melayu…

If nothing else, I’m happy to note from the poster that all nationalities are working in air-conditioned rooms. In these days of rising temperatures and oil prices, that’s a blessing whatever your price.

Hat tip: Unknown source via Digg and Mark Zip.

Bishop Robinson is Episcopalian (which is pretty High Church in the American protestant food chain), but even in that fairly liberal congregation being frankly gay has offended many. I’m especially pleased that he sets a good example to his many flocks. I ran in to the Bishop when we were both talking at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales last month. I happened to have on me a large number of chocolate flavoured condoms (as one does at a literary festival). I proffered these to the Bish — he howled with laughter and grabbed a large handful.

Now that he’s happily married, I hope he’ll save them for special occasions.

As a downpayment, resulting from late night goadings from a particularly delightful journalist disappointed that I have not yet kept my word, I offer The Whole boy, promised in the footnote on page 99.