McGill nurses bring Tanzanian AIDS activist to campus
In her native Africa, nurse Betty Liduke spends her days walking from village to village, educating people about HIV/AIDS and challenging societal taboos. In the Highlands of Tanzania, where AIDS has orphaned a disproportionately high number of children, where HIV is seen as an inevitability and where the dying walk several kilometres to reach the nearest hospital, Liduke quietly and consistently urges wives to insist on condoms, trains dozens of ordinary people to become peer leaders and slowly substitutes facts among the local people.
Liduke works out of one of the three hospitals comprising the Highlands Hope consortium, a collaborative effort with the McGill School of Nursing and those hospitals. "What's unique about Betty is that her biomedical knowledge of the disease is thorough, plus she has a sense of leadership and group dynamics that is quite amazing and quite needed," said Madeleine Buck, an assistant director at the School of Nursing.
The School of Nursing is honouring Liduke with an appointment as its first International Clinical Instructor in Africa. The appointment recognizes her work as well as her role as an educator of future nursing students that the School will send to the area, as part of its ongoing commitment to train globally minded nurses and its recent contributions to help Highlands Hope deliver comprehensive HIV/AIDS care to rural Africans.
On Tuesday, August 22, at noon, Betty Liduke will speak on her experience single-handedly running a safe-sex World Health Organization program in 17 Tanzanian villages. The talk will be held in room 118 of the McGill School of Nursing, Wilson Hall, 3506 University St.
