Positive People

About the Book

Positive People: Combatting HIV and AIDSis a fusion of stories, mostly from one of the co-authors (Wyatt-Morley) based on her personal experience as an HIV positive mother and as Executive Director of an HIV/AIDS support organization, Women On Maintaining Education and Nutrition (WOMEN), together with writings, mostly in the form of arresting and very down-to-earth poems by Dr. Ian Mayo-Smith, an international expert on management and development, who is former Vice Chairman of the Board of WOMEN, and currently its International Adviser. The book highlights the special problems of people of color in gaining access to health care and in particular discrimination against women in medical matters. It deals with the devastating effects of HIV/AIDS amongst the elderly as well as amongst teenagers and people in their twenties. The authors plead for a greater understanding of this global health crisis and for realistic action to deal with it.

About the Author

Dr. Ian Mayo-Smith was born in Britain but has lived for extensive periods in Greece, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Brunei and Thailand, where he has a second home. He has also worked in many other countries in Afirca, Asia and the Caribbean as a consultant for the World Bank, U.N.D.P., the Ford Foundation, U.S.A.I.D., The Academy for Educational Development and Harvard University. He served in the British army in World War II as a cipher breaker at Bletchley Park and then returned to Cambridge University to complete his Master's degree. He worked for several years in a military intelligence post in Greece, before going to Nigeria where he served in the civil service for eleven years and then joined the staff of the Ford Foundation which sent him back to Nigeria for two more years, before sending him to Kenya. (For his work in Nigeria he was honored by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II with the award of the M. B. E.) After four years in Kenya he joined a United Nations team setting up a management training institute, now the Eastern and Southern Africa Management Institute. He later rejoined the University of Connecticut where he became Director of the Institute of public Service International. He retired from U.Conn in 1988, but was almost immediately asked by the Harvard Institute of International Development to join their team in Brunei Darussalam, where he became Harvard's resident representative. Two years later he retired from full time employment but continued for some years to work as a consultant.

He has a Ph.D. in international management education. He is a qualified professional photographer and his photographs have been published from time to time in newspapers and magazines in England, Nigeria, Tanzania and the U.S. He has co-written, composed music for, produced, and acted in a musical review.

His first published writing was written when he was 13 years old. While working in Nigeria and Kenya he published the first of his books and training manuals on public management. He wrote several more while at the University of Connecticut, but in his "retirement" he has turned to writing mainly poetry. His poems have been published in Britain, Nigeria, Kenya and Australia as well as the U.S. Three of his books of poetry have been published in the U.S. and his Buddhist fable "Mara in the Land of Smiles" is to be published by Orchid Press in Thailand in Spring, 2006.

At the age of eighty he does not seem to be showing much sign of slowing down.