it has been hot here in Vienna and sweating became one of the common threads linking the thousands of delegates together...with air conditioning a luxury few experienced, mental exhaustion from the heat resulting in muted attention spans required presentations and sessions to be particularly engaging and thought-provoking if they were going to have an impact...while we saw numerous barriers to participation in this conference for our communities that we anticipated, mother nature was not one of them...and for this I must whole heartedly applaud the dynamic speakers that delivered our programme of activities...without bias I can truly say that each presentation had the power to inspire, inform, and produce what i call the "eyebrow effect"

the "eyebrow effect"  includes intermittent raised eyebrows, the deer-caught-in-headlights expressions, and the occasional gasps or whispers of "wow" or "what?" caused by experiences of enlightenment or wonder...this effect was rampant in our sessions as I scanned participants to see their reactions to the information presented.

While the issue of HIV/AIDS in Africa is a well known internationally, the epidemics of African and Black populations in the Diaspora, who continue to experience disproportionate incidence and effects from HIV/AIDS is not as well known. Our sessions were deliberate in presenting data and experiences from a global perspective and it was clear that as people began to realize and acknowledge the urgency of our epidemics, whether they were in Belgium, Washington, Toronto, London, France, or anywhere else where African and Black people live, the "eyebrow effect" became rampant...a shared understanding more unifying than the sweat but not as visible... 

in the coming days I will be posting all the presentations from our sessions as well as reflections on the dialogues that hopefully will produce the same effect for you...For those of you that were in Vienna and attended our sessions I encourage you to send your reflections and experiences to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and I will share them through this blog so others can learn from your insights.

the conference may have come to a close today but our journey to AIDS 2012 and beyond is just beginning...with a renewed commitment and an unprecedented amount of support for the mission of ABDGN from other global networks, government bodies, international donor agencies, and grassroots African and Black organizations and networks across the Diaspora we connected with, I am reminded of the critical role ABDGN has and will continue to play, to ensure the "eyebrow effect" will translate into tangible actions and strategies.

i'll close with a phase used by Phill Wilson, executive director of the Black AIDS Institute and a member of the ABDGN governing council, coined by Alice Walker, the Pulitzer prize winning author of The Color Purple, that I suspect will become the rallying cry for the ABDGN as we march in solidarity with our communities towards 2012...

we are the ones we have been waiting for

k