lise@ttol.co.tt

Doing The Maths

• It takes the power of one individual to shine his light of truth into the shadows of shame.
• HIV is not necessarily a death sentence and is not a curse but it is a bad and dangerous epidemic.
• The more we keep HIV- positive people hiding in the shadows with our attitudes, the harder it is for all of us.

“It takes the power of one individual to shine his light of truth into the shadows of shame. It takes the power of one to be a powerful voice in a world of noise. It takes the power of one to give hope to those who cower in fear. It takes the power of one to show compassion to those who face the scorn of their communities, their families, their schools and their work places because of their HIV status. The power of one has a responsibility to embrace those who are socially marginalised, vulnerable and disadvantaged. More importantly, it takes the power of one to reach into the hearts of those who feel inadequate, and say to them that you are indeed powerful beyond measure.”

—David Soomarie,

HIV/Aids activist

I grow up with HIV. Like my whole generation, I never had a adult sexual encounter where I didn’t know that sex without a condom could be a life-threatening risk. And like plenty people in my generation, that don’t mean I never take a chance.

David Soomarie, the man I quote just now, is my age. The chance he take buss. He is one of the 230,000 people in the Caribbean who HIV positive, though not one of the 14,000 people who does dead here every year from Aids.

David, who is a Facebook friend of mine, is a activist trying to get people to be more aware of HIV and the damage that stigma around the virus does cause.

Take for instance testing. A Aids test doesn’t take three weeks like long-time; now you could do it in 15 minutes. It fairly cheap: you could spend about $100 or so to do it in FPA. So why all of we who sexually active doesn’t go and get tested?

David is one of the few people in the country who brave enough to stand up and say that he HIV. Yes, he HIV, and he not shame to put he picture on the papers and he story all on the Internet. He friends and family and co-workers know he have it. But you know the person who give him the virus when he was a youth never tell him he had it.

As a person born in the generation of HIV, David should of know better than to have casual unprotected sex. After all, you never know who you dealing with and in T&T the HIV rate high enough for you to look at everybody coki-eye when it come to infection.

But when it come down to it, whether or not you could say David and all the other people who HIV “look for their thing,” that is no excuse for shunning them. Stigmatisation of people with HIV not helping you, even you who so good and pure and righteous that you could never get HIV. Because why you think all the people who have HIV does shame and frighten to talk about it? And what you think that does do to the spread of the infection? The more HIV positive people hide, the easier it is to spread the virus.

HIV is not necessarily a death sentence and is not a curse but it is a bad and dangerous epidemic. As the UNAids report say this year, “Aids remains one of the leading causes of death among people aged 25 to 44 years in the Caribbean.” The more we keep HIV-positive people hiding in the shadows with we ignorant attitudes, the harder it is for all of we.

I grow up knowing about HIV. My daughters too. So how come it have little girls and boys Miss Thing age, 15 years, who having sex without condoms? They feel love go protect them against HIV? Or they just so frighten of the consequences of insisting on using a condom that they don’t even want to bring it up?

We as a society have to admit, now that is a whole generation pass, that HIV here to stay. We could either keep treating it with scorn and pretending that people like David don’t exist, and face higher and higher rates of infection; or we could face the fact that it here and deal with it. The same way we does teach children to look both ways before crossing the street, or wash their hands before they eat, or have good personal hygiene, the same way we must tell them that sex without a condom is not a option until they get tested and in a perfectly monogamous, long-term relationship.

I don’t know how much of my friends, neighbours or co-workers HIV. Watching the statistics, I know it have to have some, because the maths wouldn’t make sense otherwise. You could say your HIV status is nobody business but your own, and you would be right, but the more people come public with their status, the harder it is for prejudice to thrive. If you know your priest have it, or your son teacher, or your wife best friend—and that these people was always good, decent and kind—then it go be that much harder for you to dismiss HIV as somebody else problem. Because in truth, although this year World Aids Day slogan in T&T was “The Power of One,” it go take all of we to cut HIV/Aids down to size.

David come out with he story in the papers and on the Internet to tell people a truth and to lift a burden. Don’t let he waste he effort.