Thursday, August 28

My AIDS report is published!

Click here for a larger  image I'm very excited because the first copies of the report I've been writing on HIV/AIDS in South Africa have just been printed!

The aim of the report is to encourage philanthropists to fund AIDS charities, and provide them with all the information and advice they need to do that most effectively. There's still work to do "marketing" the report by sending it to relevant people and making presentations to potential donors.

My next project at NPC is probably going to be a sector report on cancer in the UK. In 2004 I may be researching charitable interventions to help prisoners, and - inshallah - doing a big international project on conflict prevention and reconsiliation.

Wednesday, August 27

An encouraging prayer

I've been feeling pretty run down recently. Partly it's sheer physical exhuastion from trying to run Jubilee Iraq as well as my full time job, and feeling frustrated that I don't have as much time and energy as JI really needs. Secondly its loneliness. One result of spending all my free time working on JI is that I haven't been able to put much energy in to social life - and being a single in London one has to really work hard at organising friendships. I've got dozens of friends in the city, some very close, but I rarely get to see any of them, and then only because I've been proactive and booked a slot in their schedule weeks in advance. I really really miss having a community - as i did at school, uni and in Jordan - where there are people around most of the time to just hang out with, without having to plan far in advance.

The most recent frustration is that an Iraqi guy who has been one of the most enthusiastic volunteers and become a good friend in the last few months suddenly turned very negative. A friend of his had misunderstood some things, and as a result I got some quite hurtful emails out of the blue. I tried to reply, but each time got new criticisms in response. I was hoping he'd call, but since he hasn't I really need to phone him and try to clear up the situation. But I'm feeling very weak and quite afraid of making the call and it turning into an unproductive argument.

Anyhow, there was a mid-week service at my church this evening, which I went along to in the hope of meeting some people. It's a good church, but it's logistically very hard to get to know people in a congregation of 1000 on a Sunday evening. We had a time of worship, then there was a time for people to share what things God had been doing in their lives or any words of advice or encouragement he'd given them for the rest of us. After that there was an opportunity to pray for each other.

A guy whom I hadn't met before prayed for me, and I was really encouraged because the things he prayed for were precisely the things on my heart. Its a pretty everyday thing in the church for God to guide people to pray very specific things into other peoples' lives, but I'd never directly experienced it so clearly myself before now. I was feeling timid and he prayed that God would give me boldness. I was feeling run down and he prayed for refreshing. I was feeling weak and he prayed for strength. I was questioning whether I was really trusting God for Jubilee Iraq and he said that God knew I wanted to serve him and would anoint me for the the call he's put on my life. I've had tough times over the last couple of years, and he said that God has been pruning me and preparing me for the work he has for me to do. All these spot-on prayers without me uttering a single word to indicate who i was and what my needs were - i might just as easily have had backache and have been wanting prayer for healing. Anyhow, I'm jotting this down so I won't forget and when I'm next feeling weak and down (this time tomorrow probably!) I will be reminded that God really is concerned about my needs and is eager to satisfy them ("Remember, your Father knows exactly what you need even before you ask him! - Matthew.6.8). Al hammdu illah, Praise God!

Saturday, August 9

South African AIDS U-turn & my job

There's just been a stunning announcement by the South African Cabinet that they will start providing antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients. This is a amazing news, and a good time to explain a little about my weird job, since I've been researching AIDS in South Africa as part of my job at New Philanthropy Capital.

NPC is a charity which looks and sounds a lot like an investment bank. In fact most of the people working here have come from the world of finance (I was previously an equity analyst at Schroders, working on socially responsible investment). About 2 years ago a group of wealthy individuals from the City, were thinking about how to improve their philanthropic giving. They concluded that they should really be putting as much research into give away their money effectively as they did in making it in the first place. Unfortunately no organisation existed which analysed charities with the rigour that investors analyse companies, and hence NPC was founded to fill this gap.

One way we go about this is by producing sectoral reports on particular areas of social need - such as domestic violence, cancer, community regeneration, conflict resolution etc. - which provide the context for effective philanthropic giving. We look at the extent of the need, methods of intervention and their outcomes (which we try to quantify as far as possible), existing provision and specific charities which could make good use of additional funding. We present this in reports and presentations which are designed to appeal to wealthy individuals to enable them to give in the most effective way (and thereby inspire them to give generously).

I joined NPC in mid-March and have been working largely on AIDS in South Africa along with a colleague with a wonderful name, Iona Joy. She made two trips to South Africa to visit about 20 projects, whilst I've been doing the contextual research - on the extent of HIV/AIDS, it's impact on society, the government response, the outcomes of interventions to prevent the spread of HIV and to treat and care for AIDS patients and their children.

What has been shocking is the appalling way the SA government, particularly President Mbeki and Health Minister Tshabalala-Msimang, have refused to even discuss providing antiretroviral drug treatment. AIDS cannot be cured, but drugs can control the damage HIV does to a persons immune system, which can extend their lives by many years. The cost of drugs has come down greatly in the last few years thanks to campaigns against pharmaceutical companies by Oxfam, MSF and others. They will never be cheap, but it would be affordable for South Africa to provide treatment for around a million patients at an advanced stages of AIDS for under a billion pounds. South Africa is fiscally quite strong and could afford this within the existing budget, however AIDS campaigners such as the inspirational Treatment Action Campaign have had to fight long and hard even to get basic provision such as drugs to reduce the risk of transmission of HIV from mothers to children.

Last week there was talk of the South African Medicine Control Council removing it's approval for Nevirapine, the drug used to reduce mother-to-child transmission and a clause was removed from the Sexual Offences Bill which would have provided antiretroviral treatment to rape victims to minimise their risk of contracting AIDS. These were the latest of many backwards steps by the government. So the announcement by the cabinet yesterday, was completely unexpected. The statement was very measured, but did say "Antiretroviral drugs do help improve the quality of life of those at a certain stage of the development of AIDS, if administered properly... The Cabinet decided that the Department of Health should, as matter of urgency, develop a detailed operational plan on an antiretroviral treatment programme... by the end of September."

The SA government has broken it's word on AIDS in the past, so we'll have to wait and see what happens but, on the face of it, this is incredibly good news! Universal treatment programs in Europe, US and Brazil have transformed the lives of many people with AIDS, contributed to reducing the spread of HIV and actually reduced health costs incurred from the hospitalisation of people dying of AIDS.

The bad news for me is that we'll have to seriously rethink our report. We've just about produced the final version of the report are receiving feedback on the draft from experts in South Africa and were planning to go to print next week... Our report is entitled "From Rhetoric to action: a guidebook on AIDS in South Africa for grantmakers and donors", and the extra work this U-turn will cause for me is a very small price to pay if the government's latest rhetoric really dues turn into action which may begin to turn the tide on AIDS.

Sunday, August 3

New rain and new wine

I managed to go camping during the wettest week this summer! I've been down in Somerset at New Wine, an annual Christian festival/conference, and it rained pretty continuously. Nevertheless I had a great time and had a chance to properly get to know some of the gang from St. Mary's, my church in London. In that very British way we knuckled down, barbequed in the rain and fortifed ourselves with much tea.

I was particularly excited because the keynote speaker at the morning meetings was one of my heros, Jim Wallis of Sojourners and Call to Renewal, who's been working for over 30 years to reawaken Christians to Jesus' radical teaching on social justice and nonviolence. In fact the dominant theme of the week, and the subject of many of the teaching seminars, was God's call to dramatically change our lifestyles and committee our lives to tackle poverty and injustice. On Tuesday there was a day off the usual program of worship and teaching, and a group of us went to a nearby housing estate and tidied people's gardens and cleared litter in the park (where we uncovered exciting treasures like burnt out motorbikes dumped in the undergrowth).

I haven't been to one of these big gatherings since the mid-90s around the time I first became a Christian, so it was a useful time to reflect on things I experienced back then. I happened to meet Jesus in the midst of a move of God sometimes reference to as the Toronto Blessing (since one of the first places touched was a Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship).

For the period roughly 1994-97 millions of people around the world had life-changing encounters with God. These encounters were often linked with physical manifestations, such as shaking bodies, crying, intense laughter etc. While this all seemed pretty bizarre to me and many other people at the time, in fact it is not that unusual. It seems reasonably that when God touches people powerfully, particularly when he heals them of deep emotional wounds, their bodies will react, because our minds, souls and bodies are intimately linked together. And there is a long history of people responding bodily when God is ministering to them. For example the Quakers were so called in the 17th Century precisely because they were seen to "quake" in prayer; Similar manifestations accompanied the birth of Methodism and can be seen at Pentecost (Acts.2) and elsewhere in the Bible. However physically manifestations are by no means necessary in an encounter with God. I've had dozens of profound times in God's presence, but only a few linked with manifestations, and obviously God can minister to people in quiet and stillness.

The thing that occured to me at New Wine last week was that the craziness of the Toronto Blessing period has given us real freedom in communal worship and helped us to accept unusual people. We can express ourselves to God in any way we like - in song, dancing, prostation etc. - and no one will bat an eyelid now. And having found ourselves doing strange, socially unusual things, like laughing for hours or rolling around the church floor like a billiard ball (as I did once back in 1995), we find it easier to be patient with the outcasts of society who don't act according to social norms. This is so clearly in line with God's character that I wonder whether it was one of his primary intentions with the Toronto Blessing: To remind the church, in this image obsessed age, that God embraces diversity and wierdness and we should too.