February 2, 2007
SPIT-BALLIN' DOWN SOUTH
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Murphy and Turner-Keller mingling at the summit |
If Louisiana's first statewide Campaign to End AIDS (C2EA) summit meeting is any indication, there's an activist force to be reckoned with burgeoning in the Pelican state. Some 20 AIDS warriors from the bayou to the East Texas border defied the unseasonably soggy weather last week to gather at Southern University in Baton Rouge to develop a plan to end Louisiana's AIDS epidemic. Louisiana needs advocates badly: The state is seventh in the country for HIV/AIDS deaths, and tenth for total new AIDS cases. 82 percent of new infections are among people between the ages of 15 and 26. 77 percent of new cases are African-American, though only 32 percent of Louisiana's population is black.
Louisiana is the 12th state to organize a core group of grassroots activists into a chapter of the national C2EA organization. The attendees included PWAs and their family members, health care providers and ASO staffers. The summit opened with a "spit-balling session," with everyone coughing up topics they wanted to see addressed. That led to the development of a four-point plan of goals to work toward: 1) educating people to become better self-advocates and recruiting more activists; 2) advocating for supportive, affordable housing, especially after Hurricane Katrina left many living with HIV along the gulf coast homeless; 3) working with faith-based communities to collapse the dialogue gap between churches and the HIV community; and 4) combating stigma.
"The C2EA organizers"—Christine Campbell and Larry Bryant—"put together an atmosphere like we could take on the whole world," says Cedric Murphy, 50, of Shreveport. Murphy wasn't the only one who felt electrified. Says Joyce Turner-Keller, 57, of Baton Rouge. "We're poised and ready to implement change. Before C2EA, I don't know that I felt so organized and focused."
Murphy lost hundreds of friends while living in San Francisco during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. But nothing prepared him for the day a C2EA van arrived at his door from San Diego in fall 2005 to kick-start a month-long cross-country C2EA campaign. "It brought tears to my eyes to see those people driving across the country to the South in a van with the words 'HIV/AIDS' written across it," he says. Since then, Murphy and his Louisiana comrades have come together to work on Ryan White reauthorization funding, ADAP, and access to HIV services in rural areas. "The biggest problem was that people didn't know what to say. But the C2EA briefs helped us learn how to communicate with our representatives," Murphy says.
Lack of transportation and services are major barriers to HIV care and prevention in Louisiana, a situation exacerbated by poverty and racism in the vastly rural state. "Anywhere in the South, there's very defined lines of race and gender," Bryant explains. "People who have money run everything and those without tend to get what they can. The HIV epidemic runs along those lines. Traditionally, the place of people living with HIV isn't to blaze trails, it's to wait and see what happens." Since C2EA started, Bryant says people are stepping up and bringing others to the table to tackle issues of access to care and supportive services. "The trick is keeping people aware that they have the tools to collaborate and bridge some of the barriers that exist," he says.
Turner-Keller, a jovial bishop who seroconverted at 52, knows a little something about backwater Louisiana. "As an HIV positive woman who grew up in the rural areas, when telling your family [your HIV status], there's still a shame factor," she explains. "You've shamed the family; you've slept with someone dirty." In her sermons she stresses that HIV is a health issue and morality has nothing to do with it. She wonders if she had gotten the message earlier to get tested, then perhaps her HIV wouldn't have reached stage 4 before her diagnosis. "That's why C2EA is making such a difference in Louisiana—people are forced to deal," she says.