20th anniversary of world AIDS day

today is world AIDS day. every 1 dec. is world AIDS day.

1 dec. 2008 is special though – as it is the 20th anniversary or world AIDS day.

the theme for this year’s world AIDS day is a follow up on last year’s theme which touch on leadership.

Leadership encourages leaders at all levels to stop AIDS. Building on the 2006 theme of accountability, leadership highlights the discrepancy between the commitments that have been made to halt the spread of AIDS, and actions taken to follow them through. Leadership empowers everyone – individuals, organisations, governments – to lead in the response to AIDS.

that’s right. leadership at ALL levels. it doesn’t mean leadership at political level only but also leadership at religion. with this in mind, as with last year, the community AIDS services penang (CASP) organised an inter-religious faith forum on ‘combating AIDS/HIV through religion’ on 27 nov. (yeah, this year we still got the same goody bag but different contents – apart from the materials on AIDS/HIB, there were souvenirs of pen and keychain).

i am in the process of writing about the forum to our catholic paper, the herald, thus i won’t tell all about the forum here. i’ll post the report up here in my blog only after it had been published in the herald (or not!).

well, all the major faith were represented in the forum e.g. christiani, buddhist, islam, sikh and hindu. it was interesting to hear the different views of all the various religions. though each religion spoke on the perspective of their own religion, ultimately, all came to a same conclusion that AIDS/HIV might be reduced if everyone were to adhere strictly to the principles and tenets of religions.

if you want to read my full report on the forum, come back, say maybe 2 weeks time. in the meantime, don’t forget to wear a red ribbon today and oh… surf around, google search for world AIDS day to learn more, ok.