ABSTRACT
Of course not all encounters between Danish professional service providers and immigrants with HIV end up disastrously. There are many accounts of successful contacts, and in the interviews several of the providers explain how they continuously develop their work by learning from past experience. But problems of contact and communication are still mentioned frequently in all interviews. Language problems and lack of interpreting were touched upon above, but beyond the problems of basic verbal understanding, a number of other problems are experienced by the service providers in their work with immigrants living with HIV. These problems are generally presented as characterizations of the immigrants-descriptions of particular traits that according to the service staff impede their work and render contact in general difficult. The point here is that these characterizations of immigrants tell a great deal more about the service providers themselves than about the immigrants. Exactly what they tell, we shall return to below.
