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VISION FOR A FUTURE COMPASSIONATE RESPONSE TO THE AIDS PANDEMIC
Service Objectives of Compassion Response Network
What sorts of projects might Compassion Response Network become involved in, beyond the year 2003, after the completion of the treatment and testing projects for Harare and Kinshasa?
The guiding purpose with respect to the work of Compassion Response Network is defined by our mission statement;
"To facilitate the emergence of a goodwill network in which the hands of men and women of goodwill are strengthened so that they become enabled to directly provide a meaningful compassionate response to the most urgent needs of humanity."
In the Constitution of Compassion Response Network, the objectives for our work with AIDS are defined in this way;
"To identify with the millions in the world with AIDS and facilitate a compassionate response through direct action until their suffering is transmuted to hope. To facilitate AIDS treatment and testing projects of sufficient scientific-medical quality to attract the interest and commitment of major aid and charitable groups. To cooperate with major aid and charitable groups to provide effective long-term responses to the AIDS pandemic."
During the year 2003, we are responding to the central objective within this broad statement; "To facilitate AIDS treatment and testing projects of sufficient scientific-medical quality to attract the interest and commitment of major aid and charitable groups." Our goal is to follow the treatment and testing projects through to completion, and publish the results with comparative assessments. We remain detached from any expectations of what these results may be, but if they are only half as positive as many of the claims coming from the promoters of these healing treatments, then surely our results will attract the interest of some within major aid and charitable groups.
If these trials are successful, they may well, with support from many other servers and charitable organisations, inspire regional projects in other African countries, focussing on providing physical treatments and blood testing to perhaps thousands of advanced AIDS patients. This is our goal. We are committed to follow through until such regional projects become a reality. Eventually the work will in time expand to a national level, and scientific testing will be done on such an extensive scale as to be able to demonstrate in world courts whether or not these alternative treatments provide an effective cure for AIDS.
Expanding the Horizons for Future Service
The work of Compassion Response Network goes far beyond the physical treatment approach of the 2003 AIDS projects in Harare and Kinshasa. It is our broader objective to "identify with the millions in the world with AIDS and facilitate a compassionate response through direct action until their suffering is transmuted to hope." Physical treatment projects provide simply one avenue of response. We are focussing on this single avenue during the year 2003 because we are such a small group, and if we did not so focus our work through very specific projects, then we would remain dreamers, and nothing would get done in practice.
After the launch of our global public appeal and initiation of our treatment projects, the numbers interested in our work will grow. We will make connections with many groups with vast experience in the humanitarian, alternative health and medical areas.
Our task is to sow seeds for the vision of the greater work to be done to provide a truly compassionate and comprehensive response to AIDS. Our dream is that a day will come when the horrors and suffering of AIDS will be merely a vague memory of a past generation. But to manifest that dream we must ourselves implement the solutions to today's tragic suffering.
Compassion Response Network is at the moment a small group, and may remain fairly small in future years. We will establish strong networking connections with many humanitarian and goodwill groups, but our main task as we see it is to forge a pathway of responsiveness to God's will through to the anchoring of the divine Plan upon Earth.
In all our work, we are guided by a meditation of synthesis. In particular, we identify with all the millions in Africa, and throughout the world who are infected with HIV and AIDS. In our meditations we attune to their cries and pains and sorrows, yet also to their hopes and dreams and joys. As we identify with them, they become close to us, even as brothers and sisters. Their needs are our own, and it is our heart desire to assist in healing their sorrows.
Thus it is that we establish a special link with the 36 patients in Harare and 7 patients in Kinshasa who are participating with us in the 2003 treatment, testing and comparative assessment projects. Through our public appeal we are facilitating a treatment program which will assist them in various ways. But through a meditation of synthesis we attune to their deeper need.
Anchoring the Future Work
In the first two months of the Harare and Kinshasa trials for 2003, the simple demands of initiating this vast (for our small group) project and seeing that all things run smoothly, will require our total focus of thought and action. But after two months, particularly after we have received back the blood test results for the 2-monthly blood tests, there will be both need and opportunity to start the practical planning stages for the future service work. The need is so immense. Where do we start?
Amidst such desperate poverty throughout Third World Africa, and in the Zimbabwe famine, it will be essential that we provide each AIDS patient within our 2003 projects with at least one highly nutritious meal each day. Without such support our patients would need to leave our projects in order to earn enough money to feed themselves.
But with our providing a daily nutritious meal for the selected patients, there is a concern that some patients may develop dependence upon being so supported. For once they are healthy and fit to work, there are no jobs. Unemployment in Kinshasa has always been extremely high, and in Harare it is at all time record levels. How do we get our patients out of this cycle of dependence?
We must involve the patients themselves in the planning process. In 2002 the AIDS patients wanting to go onto our treatment project could only wait patiently. They were for the time outside of the planning process. This will all change when the Kinshasa and Harare projects commence. We will then develop sociocratic circles to integrate the patients into the planning process, along with carers, doctors, volunteers and all who are involved in the projects. We will be inviting everyone involved to participate in the planning process.
Then when the 2-monthly blood test results are back for both Kinshasa and Harare, new opportunities for participation will arise. These results will provide for us the first set of scientific data to determine which treatments would be best for long term development in Africa. In such long term planning we must consider many needs, from cost, safety, prevention of secondary infectious diseases, nutrition, psychological development and empowerment, economic sustainability and development of employment opportunities for formerly AIDS infected patients.
Future Group Work
After the return of the 2-monthly blood test results, we will invite meetings between many groups, involving members of Compassion Response Network with their extended networks linking to men and women of goodwill overseas, with members of PNI Empowerment Trust, with co-workers and volunteers, with doctors and scientists and above all with the AIDS patients themselves, those that have been on our 6-months treatment projects and also those who have not yet been on these projects and who want participation in future projects.
We will then invite a discussion, firstly among the AIDS patients themselves, asking them, "what treatments would they like to see most used in future projects?" We will be asking them to consider the ease of treatment, the safety and also the cost of providing treatments, besides the effectiveness of the treatments. We will ask the AIDS patients who have received our treatment whether they would like to become employed in AIDS support projects, such as growing herbs with curative value, or constructing electrical devices in an electronics workshop, or providing care in a goodwill AIDS support and treatment centre. Our aim will be to provide effective and cheap treatment to the many. Cheapness of treatment may depend upon developing industries employing many people, many of them former AIDS patients, in Zimbabwe, the Congo and throughout Africa. It is our belief, that once we have the medical scientific data from this project, we will together be able to decide which treatments will be most effective for long term development within Zimbabwe and the Congo and Africa generally.
Those patients who have participated in our 6-months treatment and testing project in 2003, we would like to invite to participate in follow up projects. We have a life-long soul commitment to them. We seek to do what we can to respond to their many physical and spiritual needs, even until the affliction of AIDS is no longer for them a disease. When many men and women gather together in common thought, great dreams are possible to become true. Slowly, we must build that network of men and women of goodwill.
Even though the main testing for 2003 will be done in Harare and Kinshasa, the results of these tests will suggest projects and regional development programs in other countries, including those who do not have ready access to modern laboratory facilities. We will be able to plan long term programs for the Congo and other French speaking nations, and throughout Eastern Africa and to India and China. Once we have a sense of direction of how to develop broader regional projects involving tens of thousands within an entire community or region, with creative responses to all the manifold areas impacted by AIDS, then we will begin to grasp the extent of the opportunities that will be opening up. All of these strands of creative contribution will during the year 2003 be linking and synthesising.
If it is found that some of the treatments lead to a clearance of viral infection and restoration of immunity function, then after the 6-months trial period is over, we will seek to provide all patients who have been on our trials with the more effective treatments. Our aim is then to facilitate the free provision of the cheaper and more effective treatments to the broader community, to gradually and steadily "open the floodgates" for the many.
Last year, 2002, was a year of preparation and planning. This year, 2003, we have the opportunity for dreams long dreamed to emerge and manifest as by magic. But also during the year 2003, we will be able to develop plans for even greater projects and challenges to develop from the year 2004 and onwards.
Famine is now impacting in a profound way upon Zimbabwe, to add to the already political/economic instability. There will inevitably be profound food and petrol shortages, plus shortages with an ever increasing list of commodities, throughout 2003.
We must not waver at the intense difficulties before us. These very difficulties must awaken within us an ever greater commitment and sense of compassion.
Future Work in Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo
Several years ago, Geraldene the CRN project coordinator for Harare, was in Johannesburg South Africa where she met Neil a research psychologist and David, one of the longest survivors with AIDS. They invited her to do a course called PNI, or Psycho-Neuro-Immunology. Six months later David and Neil visited Harare, where Geraldene organised TV and radio appearances and 2 PNI workshops that sold out.
When they left, they told everybody who wanted to do the course, that Geraldene was doing it in Zimbabwe. So it was that Geraldene was inundated with people wanting PNI. The rest is history. PNI proved to be so popular that it spread throughout Zimbabwe and a wide network and official Trust was developed to respond to the huge need and demand.
PNI is based on the mind body connection which Geraldene thinks is more powerful than we realise. The PNI Advanced Personal Empowerment workshop is extremely powerful. For years, Geraldene has been using it, combined with nutrition, counseling and information to release fear and restore health to people with severe HIV infection. To provide distinction, we will not be using PNI with the 2003 treatment projects. But after the present projects are completed, we could devise other projects which bring physical treatment and PNI together. Then we may really see something amazing.
Albert, our CRN project coordinator for Kinshasa, heads a goodwill group serving humanity in many fields;
Albert is presently involved in coordinating the 2003 treatment and blood testing project in Kinshasa. After the completion of this project he describes his future service work as;
Outreach to Other Countries and Regions.
After completion of the 2003 projects, there will be need to sponsor a tour for Geraldene to speak about the projects and results throughout southern African nations, and for Albert to tour African speaking nations.
We will need to initiate goodwill service and treatment groups in other African countries and throughout the world.
We must provide healing facilities and treatments applicable for remote rural regions in Africa where they lack modern conveniences and electricity.
We must respond to the vast AIDS pandemic sweeping India, where the adult infection rate has recently touched 20%, and people with infection are shunned as though they are "untouchable".
We must establish networking links with AIDS workers in China, where the extent of the pandemic is set to transcend even Africa or India, and where the great need is simple information about AIDS and availability of treatment. We must support people's movements for these simple rights.
The way of Compassion Response Network is to select those few projects that most powerfully reflect the extremity and urgency of human need and suffering, and then commit to the healing of these situations through compassionate and direct response to need.
We will not be intimidated by opposition from either conservative medical circles or from political obstruction. These matters are not our concern, our concern being only a direct and compassionate response to profound need. Eventually the principles of love, goodwill, unity and right human relations will hold sway. In these principles we trust implicitly.
We are committed to continue helping the patients presently on our projects, even if it may take many years, until each is returned as far as possible to vibrant health. We will continue to build the work in both Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo, beyond the year 2003 for the need is great. Neither famine nor organised opposition will deter us. We identify with these people and this commitment is life-long.
We must not waver at the intense difficulties before us. These very difficulties must awaken within us an ever greater commitment and sense of compassion.
We have established a soul link with the wonderful people we are presently connected with in service in Zimbabwe and in the Congo and throughout Africa, and yet also with all AIDS patients throughout the world. We are ever one with them.