…in honour of Andre Subryan
ARTISTES in Direct Support has launched its Voluntary Counselling and Testing (VCT) Site at its office on Alexander Street, Kitty, in honour of deceased founder member and theatre personality Andre Subryan. The launching, which took place yesterday, comes on the eve of National Week of Testing, which will commence towards the end of November and which has become a yearly feature on the health calendar.
“This year marks 10 years since the death of Keith Andre Subryan, founder member of Artistes in Direct Support, so one of the things we wanted to do is to have a testing site to help the community to access free and non discriminatory testing,” Executive Director of Artistes in Direct Support, Desiree Edghill, said.
She said the project is a collaboration between her NGO, UNDP and the National Aids Programme Secretariat (NAPS).
Edghill said that the National Aids Programme Secretariat will be doing the training of persons to become counsellors and testers who will volunteer their time to the site. Further, she said that NAPS will be providing testing kits to the site. “We are going to be working with health care providers, with uniformed services in terms of stigma and discrimination,” she said, expressing her excitement at the project and becoming emotional in the process.
Edghill said that originally, the project was to have been done in collaboration with Guybo and SASOD, two NGOs focused on gays and lesbians. But she said that there will still be some form of collaboration between Artistes and these two organisations.
“We are calling it the Keith Andre Subryan testing site in his honour,” she said. Subryan died on September 11, 2000, after combating AIDS. He is remembered for being one of the best talents on the local stage, was iconic in his portrayal of Miss Lottie, who, together with Miss Cleo, formed one of the most lovable geriatric duos on radio and in television advertisements.
Speaking at the launch of the site, Minister of Health Dr. Leslie Ramsammy said that every time “we add space and capacity for testing in Guyana to help in diagnosis, we are doing something very significant…it is a very large step”
He emphasised that testing for any kind of malady is a free service, unlike many other poor countries and unlike what obtained during the 1990s in Guyana. He said that in the last 10 years or so, there is growing capacity for the NGOs “to contribute to the service that we provide.”
He said that it is significant that the NGOs have begun to compliment the services provided by the public sector and by the private sector.
“All of us as human beings have our own whims and fancies. Some of us will never go to the public sector, even those of us who sometimes struggle for money. And some of us find the formal sector, whether it is public or private, as an intimidating environment; so we prefer to go to certain other places as operated by the NGOs. There are many of us who do not want to get tested in our communities,” he said, adding that this is not for HIV alone.
“So many times we choose to go outside of our community or outside of the formal structure since nurses and other health workers seem to know you in the community, from birth to death; they know every bit of your family life, a lot of people feel sensitive so for certain things they go outside…That is the one great asset that the NGOs represent. They provide an alternative,” said the Minister.