Howaids

30/09/2021

One of the hardest facts to reconcile in Southeast Asia is the diversity that exists here. In many countries, this diversity is perceived not as a symbol of strength, but something to suppress. Southeast Asia is the most diverse place on planet Earth. One feature of our diversity is the number of languages spoken by our population of 662 million people. However, in some education systems, the majority of students are inducted in a language they do not speak at home. While this is justifiable for nation building, the problem with comprehension is not decreasing. With English as the world’s first truly global lingua franca or common language, and with most of scientific understanding requiring competency in English, the problem is becoming more pronounced in the Information Age. At its crux, this is the problem we have with AIDS prevention in Southeast Asia, where much of the information is available in a language that only 10% of the population are active users.

30/09/2021

The complication in public health communications we have yet to face up to, is arguably the problem that makes it so easy to justify the fear of AIDS. In the days before effective treatment, such justifications may be defensible. This is no longer the case today. As communities, we speak often about our rights to health, and we believe that we are leaving no one behind. In this essay, we challenge the presumptions that there can be rights without comprehension, and provide statistics on the proportion of people we have been leaving behind by default in Southeast Asia. That’s the kind of community systems we need for equitable healthcare for all; and not only those who comprehend and accept the importance of medicine and science.

27/09/2021

Systems thinking is harder to achieve than one may think. We are often beguiled by the fact that just because we can repeat the word “systems” and append it to other words, such as “community systems”, “health systems” or “economic systems” for example, we know what systems are, and how they work. Unfortunately, the reality is not so simple. Systems are abstractions of dynamic interactions we cannot see. All we are able to do objectively, is to report the outcomes of systems, and guess how they have come about. Most times we do this with computer simulations, but these models depend not only on assumptions going in, but interpreting them are founded on assumptions too. If we are not careful, we could be creating a closed loop like a dog chasing its tail. Systems in shadow can therefore lead us astray. Questions are these: if we can’t see systems directly, how do we know our assumptions hold, and our measurements are right?

With biological and technological systems, there is some hope yet. At least they are visible to some degree. But social systems, on the other hand, can be frightfully challenging, since they often deal with conceptual ideas that are not only unseen, but hard to grasp. But that’s where most of the human systems that yield the greatest influence tends to be. This abstract introduces an essay that has taken 2 years of research and thought to write. In it, we argue that what we think of as community systems are not systems at all, but community networks. There is a good heuristic to use when evaluating whether someone grasps a system. Their account must include its dynamics. Systems are never still, and the dynamic core of any system is a cycle of revolving interactions, and without these cycles, the description is not about systems. That’s how we figured out that community systems as it has been applied in public health literature, are not about systems. The cycles are missing from them. Something to consider.

17/03/2020

And so, it begins. The creation of a fully digital service council in Southeast Asia. A small tentative step with our first blog post. Join us as we start this exciting journey. The best thing about this effort? It's hours of entertaining drama, that's if you like to hear us banging our heads against the wall trying to get (software) playing nicely in cyberspace. I jest. The best thing is it's completely risk-free of Covid-19.

Don't let the picture fool you. That is not some lone cloud drifting in the sky, disconnected from the world. What isn't visible is the heat that binds water molecules together in a global heat and water exchange system. That single cloud is part of a complex system that is visible only when the tem...