Through a long, competitive search on
Diigo and Delicious, I have found my social bookmarking soulmate! Her name is
Aldona Van Haesevelde. Her profile on Delicious is cedocaafrika.
She tends to focus on human rights and health issues in Africa. For example, she explores the impact of anti-homosexuality laws on the prevalence of HIV. This is incredibly useful to me because I am writing a research paper on this topic and its impact on Uganda. In addition, I intend to explore these topics in this blog. Because her interest in Africa coincides with my interest in Africa, we are social bookmarking soulmates. Even though she mainly focuses on Sudan, Senegal, and Angola, she has tagged Uganda and other African countries numerous times. Her bookmarks for Uganda provide useful information to readers who want to understand the health of Ugandans from a human rights perspective. I will refer to her bookmarked pages in my future blog posts. Thus, readers of this blog might find it worthwhile to look at the different pages she has bookmarked.
She also explores health and
political issues individually through bookmarking various political pages and
health research pages that are unrelated to one another. Her bookmarking topics
include health, politics, crime, warfare, justice, culture and rights. I can
tell from the way she tags her pages that she approaches her understanding of
African communities in a holistic way. This holistic approach is a public
health approach. Because I am in the public health field, her holistic tags and
bookmarking align perfectly with my interests. Her holistic approach to African
issues is the same approach I wish to emulate in writing this blog about
Uganda.
She has 470 tags for 2500 public bookmarks. These tags are very organized as she labels pages by both date and topic. If a topic is complex, she appropriately adds multiple tags in order to identify the complexity of the issue. Her organized tags have enabled me to search for very specific topics within her bookmarks. This is very beneficial to all people who don’t want to read through 2500 webpages to find the topic they are looking for. Her thorough and organized tags allow me to enter a few key words and access all of the pages related to them.
My soulmate, however, is less thorough in
her comments. Most of her bookmarked pages do not have any comments. If they do
have comments, they are very short, generalized descriptions of the page. Other
comments seem to categorize the pages. At one point, I found a comment labeling
the page for her PhD work. This leads me to believe that many of her bookmarked
pages are organized and categorized solely for research purposes. However, she
has been bookmarking consistently since 2009. This reveals sustained interest
in African issues for a significant period of time. There is no way of
deciphering whether her research led to her passion for Africa, or if her
passion for Africa led to her research. Either way, her bookmarking is a very
useful tool for my studies.
Because she bookmarks consistently, her profile
is very up-to-date on current events in Africa. This makes her profile a
practical resource to consult, as one can regularly rely on her bookmarks to
learn about what is going on in Africa.
After looking through her bookmarks, I
have found some wonderful sources:
Gem
# 1: From personal survival to public
health: community leadership by men who have sex with men in the response to
HIV
This article
highlights the important of the connection between personal and community
health as drivers of health advocacy. The “passion and
urgency brought by MSM communities have led to the targeting and expansion of
HIV and AIDS research and programming, and have improved the synergy of health
and human rights, sustainability, accountability, and health outcomes for all
people affected by HIV”. This article details the importance of involving the
homosexual community in HIV programs in order to ultimately reduce HIV
prevalence.
Gem # 2: The Framework Convention on Global Health: A tool for empowering the HIV/AIDS movements in Senegal and South Africa
This article discusses the “right to
health” approach taken by civil society in South Africa and Senegal in the context
of combating the HIV epidemic. This right to health approach will empower HIV
movements to secure the expansion of HIV treatment and prevention services.
“The movement’s ethos expresses the idea that
promoting and protecting health and promoting and protecting human rights are
inextricably connected.”
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