It’s now only one day until I travel to New York City for the UNGASS meeting and its starting to show. I’m becoming increasingly apprehensive and nervous; the potential for real commitment and action, as well as for more continued bureaucratic wrangling, is currently hanging tenuously in the balance.

During my day job, I work for a development agency which has a lovely modern office with lots of lovely, educated, passionate mostly-Western professionals who seem to be forever coming back from Sudan or flying out to Haiti. Occasionally, employees who are young mothers bring cute, well-tended babies in for a visit. At the kitchenette, we discuss RFAs (Requests for Assistance) alongside sailing trips and rec-league softball.

It is forever surreal to go from one’s daily routine: rattling away at interminable email queues, working out how to add streaming video to a presentation, yawning in traffic surrounded by single-passenger SUVs, to the people and communities we’re actually endeavoring to assist. Geographic distance at this point is no longer the great mental chasm of yesteryear—budget airfare has taken care of much of that—so much as the economic chasm, whose growing distance continues to prove difficult to bridge. I scan through photographs for a project: an Internally Displaced woman from South Sudan, an Indonesian builder who lost family and possessions to natural disaster, smiling children from every continent. Even with all of my college anthropology and cross-cultural education and the Peace Corps stories of colleagues, I still ask myself:

“What could I possibly have in common with this person?” Sometimes it feels like we inhabit different solar systems; the notion of a ‘global village’ like a castle in the sky.

And most recently, I think of Ameta.

Of all the passionate young people my time as a youth advocate on global HIV and health issues has allowed me to meet, he stands out most clearly. A 20 year-old whose maturity in both appearance (wearing yellow) and world view belie preconceptions of youth, he is a native of East Timor, the world’s youngest nation as well as one of its poorest. Health and food security remain major issues, and the threat of HIV looms large. On a recent trip there, he accompanied me on a three-day journey to climb Mt. Matebian. Despite the vastly diverging paths our personal and country histories have followed (I grew up a short flight south of him in a small town in Western Australia), I was astounded at how well we got along, at the most human of levels. Among the things we discussed were our respective aspirations: he is studying engineering to help rebuild his conflict-leveled country, I want to help make that possible; spirituality (he meditates frequently, I envy his discipline); and women (the verdict being that they are a puzzle impossible to solve).

Those few days with Ameta were, in hindsight, more rewarding than those spent traipsing around the capital city meeting with NGOs and development agencies. For me, speaking with Ameta drove home the reality that beneath all of these external differences: education, religion, and so forth, we are ultimately cut from the same cloth. We desire the same things in life, and we face similar obstacles.

As I prepare for the UNGASS review, where wealthy and powerful individuals will hammer out more resolutions whilst millions of people living with HIV/AIDS struggle on without medication, and while programs continue to “educate” youth around the world that their only hope for stopping AIDS is “secondary virginity,” Ameta rarely strays far from my thoughts. He, and millions of young people throughout this troubled planet, are hungry for the states and institutions which were built to represent them, to let them speak out. To take part in the decision over how to combat a disease which is ravaging our generation, robbing us of opportunity, and breaking down the engines of society.

To borrow a line from a rather well-known AIDS organization:

In solidarity,

Mark

Addendum: Ameta and the people of East Timor are in the midst of resurging violence and social unrest. In his last email to me, a fortnight ago, he expressed concern over growing “danger” and his hopes for peace. Please keep him in your thoughts. He can be reached at: [email protected]