Thanks to all of you,
I was feeling very silly and embarrassed, not only to be in this situation, but then to publish the depths of my desperation for all to see. Thanks for being positive supporters rather than shocked pity people.
If you all don’t mind, I just wanted to paste up a couple of my favorite responses. But I didn’t get official permission for this midnight whim, so again, sorry if I am braking internet etiquette.
ÿ Since you're into being an exhibitionist these days, you could get someone to Live-Cam the delivery and he could go to an Internet cafe and... maybe you already thought of that. :)
ÿ 5 minutes on your blog and i know two times as much more about you, your ideas and your dreams. it was about time. i'll comment a lot i guess.(-from an ex lover I have known for fifteen years.)
ÿ 1)ACCEPT ALL THE HELP YOU CAN GET w/o any guilt or worrying about "paying people back" (that was a big lesson I've learned this year). Anyone, especially family, who wants to offer you help and hospitality does it because they love you, and won't need anything in return (you can double-check that from the get-go to make sure there's not funky unsaid expectation). There are times when we are able to give, and other times when we are most able to receive. Both times are important and deserve their glory.
ÿ keep your awesome attitude up, you gave me some grins today.
You are a wonderful writer. I read the whole blog…Your posting on male circumcision was thought-provoking. I still not sure I understand why AIDS is a raging epidemic in Africa, but not in the US… (this article was linked:http://discovermagazine.com/2004/feb/why-aids-worse-in-africa)
YEAH!!! Thanks for challenging me on the circumcision/PEPFAR issue. (With different risk factors in the states, and a different parenting culture my child will ENDURE, I have not thought that considering circumcision is an issue…if I have a son. But maybe someone has other ideas I should evaluate. Maybe I should just focus on more pressing issues, like an income. Anyway, in an exercise my Italian friend calls a Sega Mentale (mental masturbation) I attach here some more research, perspectives, and responses to the pro circumcision outfit.
All the following italics are excerpts from the article link above.
MALE CIRCUMCISION AND HIV
For years researchers have puzzled over why most West African countries have lower HIV-infection rates than southern and East African countries. They thought it might have something to do with the Muslim religion, widely practiced in West Africa, which imposes restrictions on women’s sexual freedom. However, another likely factor is male circumcision, which is ritually practiced by Muslims and many others.
Several studies suggest that male circumcision protects both men and their sexual partners from HIV infection. This is not true of female circumcision, or female genital mutilation, which is extremely dangerous. In African countries where male circumcision is common, such as Senegal, Mali, Ghana, Benin, and the entire region of North Africa, HIV rates tend to be much lower than in countries such as Botswana, Malawi, and Swaziland. In countries with high rates of HIV, provinces and districts that have high rates of circumcision, such as Inhambane in Mozambique or Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, tend to have lower HIV rates. Two African tribes with very high HIV-infection rates are the Zulu of South Africa and the Tswana of Botswana. Before colonial times, men in both tribes underwent circumcision rituals during adolescence. But when King Shaka united the Zulu tribe in the 1820s, he abolished the ritual, and when Christian missionaries settled in with the Tswana in the late 19th century, they declared circumcision a barbaric practice.
Circumcision removes mucosal tissue and cell types in the foreskin that contain special “receptors” for HIV. Some estimates suggest that circumcision may cut a man’s risk of contracting HIV by 70 percent. If true, this would mean that male circumcision may prove more effective than any of the HIV vaccines undergoing clinical trials. It would also be much cheaper, carry few side effects, and require no booster shots. Randomized, controlled trials of circumcision for HIV prevention are under way in South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda, and the results should be known within three years. —H. E.
So snip it! This is my immediate reaction. 70% risk reduction, cheaper, few side effects and require no booster shots! Lets do what we can!!
Although condoms are 90% risk reduction (10% being lost to human error) it is hard to get folks to actually USE the condoms, and so the investment in circumcision, if estimated risk reduction is actually 70%, makes sense.
But guess what, I agree with Bush that the focus should be on reducing the number of partners.
Oh how shocking to say!!
I am so conservative! In the name of women’s rights, and better economics, this approach does more than to simply focus on barrier methods (circumcision being counted as such here because removal of the extra mucosal membrane creates a barrier of more resistant skin.)
I don’t mean to say that I am opposed to male circumcision as a preventative action for HIV infection.
What I unfortunately can’t find online (but surely it is out there) is an analysis of the cost difference between PEPFAR’s funding for condom use is vs. funding for circumcision education and procedures.
The issue is that family planning…that’s so politically correct, I mean WOMEN’S health clinics are not getting funding because the clinic chooses to serve (the) prostitutes (that the men are visiting.)
And check out these words in that article:
Half the Thai men in Morris’s survey (an epidemiologist trying to figure out the right mathematical equation to explain the reality of the AIDS epidemic.) said that they had sex with prostitutes but rarely the same one twice. On average they saw five prostitutes each year. Although many Thai prostitutes are HIV-positive, the men’s risk of infection was relatively low because Thai men generally had sex with each one only once. (Oh is THAT why? My, how oversimplified)
The likelihood of contracting the virus during a single sexual act is believed to be quite low, between 1 in 100 and 1 in 1,000. (Notice-no differentiation between m/f) So if an HIV-positive man has sex once with hundreds of different uninfected people, chances are he will infect only one of them. (Leading to this faulty reasoning.)
Anti-AIDS campaigns warn against contact with prostitutes, but Morris says simultaneous long-term relationships are far more dangerous.
I am all for facts above morals, but I don’t believe what is being presented here is hard facts.
What is being presented is a faulty reasoning. Thai men generally had sex with many prostitutes only once. His rate of GETTING infected does not relate to his rate of INFECTING OTHERS, because of the biological differences between male/female genitalia. (as you mentioned)
What is being concluded is that sex with prostitutes isn’t necessarily dangerous, it is long term relationships that are.
Again, we are investigating and talking about this backwards. In the name of HIV prevention, we are giving men yet another tool to control sex. They have Choice, Condoms, and Circumcision. While women are still the ones more likely to engage in a long term simultaneous sexual relationship in order to keep her family fed, because the man is out using these tools, and his larger income, with the expert endorsed low-risk prostitutes, who they themselves are receiving no US funded intervention. Wow. While women, in my experience, are the ones to go to the health clinics where the education programs are, or the ones willing to organize themselves and learn about community health when there is no profit motive other than…Health. The men have the tools, but are not the ones who are receiving training on the dangers of promiscuous behavior, the importance of communication and partnership in marriage, etc. (Another project that I was proud to have attempted in PC, and worked with Tino on) They get these billboard messages, and then get free condoms, free circumcision, cheap women, and control in the bedroom at home.
Little about this AIDS epidemic has really changed anything in development. Wheels are spinning to find the most effective solution, when of course it is a blend of all that we can do. Like development, HIV/AIDS prevention is still fundamentally about creating equal rights and economic opportunities. Yet, this time around, what if our financial focus was to create dialogue and counseling groups for men for behavior change? Funding another tool like circumcision, which puts them more biologically in advantageous has its pros and cons.
Here are some more fun tid bits:
Some estimates suggest that a person who has been recently infected with HIV may be as much as 100 times more likely to transmit the virus to a partner than someone who has been infected for a long time. African-style simultaneous long-term relationships may therefore be even riskier than Morris’s models assume. If one member of a Ugandan sexual network becomes HIV-positive, the virus will spread very quickly to all other members of the network in a very short time.
Actually, this seems to prove to me why the Thai model of multiple partners in a prostitution network is more at risk, yet the infections rates are so low.
One thing that was not mentioned in this article on why infection rate was so high in Africa comparatively was the lack of health services, including testing, and the lack of hope get tested and to make a plan to live HIV-free.
The following bar interview was spot-on with what I found in TZ about male perspective on female loyalty:
I asked him how many girlfriends he had, and he told me he had three, one real girlfriend and two secret girlfriends. He had been seeing all three for at least two years. He used condoms with the secret girlfriends but not with the real one. How many secret boyfriends do those secret girlfriends have? I asked. He said he didn’t know, but you can never trust women, and that’s why he used condoms. And the real girlfriend? “As I said, you never know with women, but if she has other partners, I hope she uses condoms with them.”
Several other men I met had similar sexual arrangements. Most women I spoke to denied that they had partners other than their husbands or fiancés, but the men frankly assumed that women conducted their affairs much as they themselves did.
Meanwhile, a woman may draw on more than one man to help pay her family’s bills.
It is a twisted relationship between fear of betrayal, and fear of scarcity, leading to betrayal and scarcity.
And the most devastating truth across Sub-Saharan Africa…
Girls are particularly vulnerable. Roughly equal numbers of men and women in Botswana are HIV-positive, but the HIV rate is much higher among teenage girls than among teenage boys, although boys and girls become sexually active at roughly the same age. A study in 2001 found that 20 percent of girls in one region of Botswana had been asked by their teachers to have sex; half said they accepted, fearing lower grades if they said no.
