Mitra Rambaran : lessons in persistence

When municipal health worker Mitra Rambaran started HIV prevention work in 1989 for the Surinamese community, she did not know any Surinamese people with HIV or AIDS. But she knew the perception of AIDS as a white problem to be a short-lived illusion.

In the Hague, she began going with AIDS educators to talk to conservative Hindustani organizations about condoms and safer sex. "People came to me and said, ’Shame on you’," she recalls. "And you are Hindustani too!"

Rambaran had refused to speak at a conference on Hinduism and AIDS. "I would have spoken if the conference had been about culture, not religion." She still attended, and tried very hard to keep calm as a Surinamese doctor argued that people with AIDS should be "cast out of society."

This was too much. "I became so angry, I got up and told him that, if there were any people with AIDS in the audience, he was insulting them." The next day, Shanti Parag called Rambaran at home to tell her that he had been sitting there.

Parag was to be the first to come out publicly as a gay Surinamese man living with AIDS. It was his tireless commitment and energy which would shake up both the Surinamese community and the AIDS institutions’ certainties about how Surinamese people were supposed to think and act about AIDS.

"When I went to the AIDS Foundation [the main funding body] for Cause of Death : Nothing," says Rambaran, "they laughed. They told us it was impossible. For them, people like Shanti could not exist."

By then, Rambaran also knew Ethel Pengel. "I had asked her a long time about if she was interested in talking publicly." It took her a long time and many involved discussions with Rambaran to make the decision.

Meanwhile, Rambaran was busy organizing a seven-week soap opera, telling a very romantic story, to be played on the migrants’ radio stations. Listeners tuned in each week for a new episode of this very romantic story about a young heterosexual couple in love. The young man finds out he is HIV+ and must tell his girlfriend, his family,and his friends.

For this drama, the writer had to read about HIV and AIDS and then "transform the information she read into a story, into the Surinamese Hindustani culture," explains Rambaran. Semi-profesional actors took on the various roles. The radio serial eventually became a stage play.

Today, the community has come part of the way toward accepting the reality of the virus, and - even more importantly - of people living with it.

Last year for World AIDS Day, it was a local immigrant radio station which called Rambaran, asking for her help. For an entire week, the station invited people to come talk about HIV and AIDS. This was done with no outside sponsorship or subsidies. "Talking about AIDS," says Rambaran hopefully, "has become an accepted community thing."

So why does Rambaran still work on a day-to-day basis ? AIDS funders have still not gotten the message : long-term institutional commitment is still lacking for migrant-run projects. For example, Amsterdam’s city council, says a policy expert, "has begun to ask where are the results of prevention. And how does one measure a broken taboo?" M