Welcome back! And welcome to Edition 2.4 of the International Carnival of Pozitivities! "The What," I hear you ask? Well this carnival is

to provide an international forum for interaction among those of us who are living with HIV/AIDS and for their caregivers, family and/or friends or those who are involved in the fight to end this Worldwide pandemic.

is not intended to provide a forum for debate over the current model of HIV as a cause of AIDS. If you wish to pursue this topic, please find another forum of like-minded bloggers.

I've known Ron via the "blogosphere" for, geez, I guess it's a few years now. We are pretty far apart on many political issues -- but we can talk to one another about them, without attacking one another and calling each other names (even is he is wrong most of the time ). I've never met Ron in person. He lives more than a couple hours from me, but perhaps one day we'll get a chance to meet in person. In the meantime, we've conversed various times via email about different topics.

Last year Ron started this carnival. He's really done a good job, trying to open up dialog and talk about actually living with this disease. He's kept the carnival up and going once a month for over a year. That's pretty good for a carnival. As you can imagine, many of those who host the carnival are already close to someone, or are someone who has this disease. For this month's carnival, Ron asked me if I'd be willing to host it, to try and spread this far and wide. I agreed.

Again, this isn't about why someone has the disease or how they got it. This is about people who are having to live every day, trying to understand what's going on and why their bodies are reacting the way they are. That's what this carnival is about. So thank you, Ron, for asking me to host. I'm honored to do so. Without further ado, I give you this month's carnival:

First up is Ron himself with an introduction to this week's carnival. Go check that out before you read the rest of this, really. It will help you put a lot in perspective.

As I was reading through all these entires, I decided to put them in random groups because I'm a logical person and must label everything First, there's a glossary of terms related to AIDS, in case you want to know what some of those terms and things mean.

Here's a category I named "detection and prevention:"

Next, there's the poems category:

Here's the video category:

There were a few posts about addictions (mostly recovery):

Then there's the open commentary category:

Thank you again, Ron, for inviting me to host this. And thank you one and and all, each who contributed an entry to this carnival. I cannot imagine what it is like to live with this disease. And thank you good readers, each and every one, for reading this far and hopefully exploring at least one of those links. If you did read this, I implore each one of you to follow at least one link and leave a comment on that post to let the people know you've been there and read what they had to say.

Any misspellings or broken links are my own fault, not the carnival participant's. Please do comment and let me know about them so I can fix them if you see any.

Oh, I almost forgot! Last month's edition was posted at Living Mindfully with HIV/AIDS, and next month will appear at Slimconomy!

Posted by: Ogre at 01:02 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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