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AIDS MESSAGES:  The best medicine

– Claire Bisseker, Financial Mail, 1 December 2006

Political satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, who has devoted the past six years to educating school children about Aids, says conditions on the ground have hardly improved in the past few years.Though there is a greater openness to discuss HIV, school children have become more cynical about the epidemic. The older ones just laugh at government's response to Aids and call President Thabo Mbeki Comrade Undertaker for his denialist stance.

Tik is also stoking the epidemic. Because the children who are on the drug have no sense of care, it fuels violence, crime, and risky sexual behaviour.

You've got to be careful not to sink into the quicksand of Aids, says Uys, who has addressed more than 1m school children in six years. The reason Aids fatigue sets in is the terrifying enormity of the statistics. I don't know any statistics, but I know lots and lots of people. Spend an hour talking to 1000 kids and you're motivated for life. He cites the example of Mary (6) from Ebeneazer, one of 1000 children that turned up to meet him in a shed in Namaqualand at the end of a dirt track. Uys asked her if she wasn't too young to be there. She said she'd come to hear him talk because she was afraid. Afterwards she told Uys that she now understands what she has to be careful of.

It's the hardest work I've ever done, he admits. You have to be terribly aware of what they don't understand and ensure that you communicate with them, rather than recite or perform.

I do Evita for the kids, that's the key. It makes them shriek with laughter. Laughter leaves an imprint of memory, and entertainment leads to education. There's nothing more lethal than boring the kids with facts. Traditional Aids prevention messages fail because they're dreary, dishonest, confusing or try to lecture to the youth, he says.

Through his inimitable talks, Uys has made an impression on a generation of school children. Today young professionals approach him and say they remember what he said to them at school five or six years ago. He is invited back to the same schools to reach the next generation.

He urges children to take responsibility for their own lives, to abstain, and if that is not possible, to learn how to use a condom properly.

Uys bemoans the lack of Aids leadership in SA.

We need role models to speak out and lead by example. It's the Bafana Bafanas, the Oprahs, the Bransons and people like (US special envoy for HIV/Aids) Stephen Lewis who went for the government's jugular (at the International Aids conference in Toronto) that make the difference. Uys is sceptical about whether government has had a change of heart on Aids, despite deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka's taking charge of government's Aids agenda and leading a rapprochement with civil society.

He fears it's gesture politics.

Government must stop confusing people with mixed signals, and President Thabo Mbeki must speak out. Why is he absolutely silent? Uys feels the collapse of moral leadership in SA is being reflected in society. For instance, former deputy president Jacob Zuma's behaviour towards women (as revealed in his rape trial) legitimised a culture of taking among many males, but what was most frightening was the deafening silence from the top.

There are clear areas of improvement, though. The main one being that anti-retrovirals are increasingly available and are working.

Moreover, people on the ground are increasingly taking matters into their own hands rather than depending on government to solve the Aids crisis.

But we need still more people showing the normality of caring for people with Aids, building new creches and orphanages, he says.

If ordinary South Africans just cared about their own family units and talked about the dangers inherent in Aids, then we'd be halfway there. The problem is that parents are absent or don't know how to talk to their children about the subject. Another positive development is that he now seldom experiences finger-wagging from parents who want to keep him away from their schools. These days he even gets requests from kindergarten parents wanting him to come and educate them about Aids.

His next step will be to make a series of presentations for Discovery Health, which will be put onto video and DVD for distribution in homes and corporations. Ideally, he would like his DVDs to retail for around R35 at garage convenience stores to maximise their exposure.

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