Hear this: ladies, fellas…all ova tha world!
It’s the second day of the conference and the Youth Party To Kick AIDS is going off with a bang. At the youth pavilion, the low-down is that it’s basically a non-stop joy-sesh. Their line-up has enough off-the-chart live music, dancing, sports, and hype jams breaking loose that at times I think the entire Global Village is gonna bust loose into a spontaneous Dance 4 Life, just like the organization that my friend Ricardo dances with in Mexico.
I can’t imagine what I would do without the youth pavilion and global village. It’s like your favorite club, coffeeshop, basketball court, icecream stand, rec centre, all rolled into one. Compared to the dryness of the scientific sessions and the big business feel of the exhibition hall, it allows people who are actually affected by the disease to come together and hang out, talk, learn, hook up, and anything else a community normally does. Without it, this conference would be a bunch of mostly white dudes coming out of their labs in their white coats from their two-car suburban homes to talk about their studies of “isolated, randomly-selected target group 1,” or something wonky like that.
Well those people aren’t “target group 1” anymore. They’re taking part, in the same building, and with just as large a visibility level as anybody else.
Because cats better recognize: We’re part of the solution, as well as the problem. All y’all out there better hear that!
