Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1991. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Associated Press; Saturday, August 10, 1991
Until a counselor points out they're small for their age, and frail. "Munchkins," she calls them.
These 23 young campers are infected with HIV, the AIDS virus. They spent a week in the woods of eastern Connecticut at what is believed to be one of only two camps in the country for AIDS-infected children.
Seven-year-old Eddie is shorter than his 3-year-old brother. He was exhausted after his arts and crafts class, where he decorated a T-shirt with glitter, and a morning dance lesson.
His counselor carried him down the dirt path to the boat dock for some fishing before lunch. After the counselor baited the hook and cast the line, Eddie took over and hauled in four bass. He threw them all back to live another day.
FAMILIES PRESENT
The children are with their families, including 10 mothers who also carry the virus. They passed it on to their children while they were still in the womb, which is the way most children with AIDS were infected.
The other adults are foster parents, or grandmothers who took over after their daughters died of AIDS or chose a life of drugs on the street over parenthood. This year, 19 healthy siblings joined the HIV- infected children.
Herbert G. Birch Services, a children's agency in New York, has run the week-long camp for the past three summers. The camp has grown from nine families the first summer to 24 this year.
This year, they set up at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, established three years ago by actor Paul Newman for children with cancer.
The name refers to the motley gang of troublemakers in Newman's movie "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." The camp is right out of the Old West, with log cabins for bunkhouses and a Main Street like the one Wyatt Earp walked a century ago in Tombstone, Ariz.
The first two years, Phyllis Susser, the agency's executive director, rented a camp in northern New Jersey. But the camp's owners were uneasy about having campers with AIDS and would not have them back.
Newman's camp opened a week early and gave Susser's group the run of the place for free.
Most of the sick children don't know they have AIDS. They only know they are sick. Four times a day they troop back to the center of camp and line up at the OK Corral, also known as the infirmary.
AZT PILLS
Nurses hand out AZT pills. Some of the children don masks, to breathe in pentamidine to forestall infections in their lungs.
"He knows he dying," a woman named Alba said of her 6-year-old foster son, Raymond. "He'll say, 'I'm standing here now, but soon I'll have to go up there,"' pointing heavenward.
But she won't tell him the name of the affliction that brought him chronic ear infections, vomiting and swollen lymph glands. She is sure he would innocently tell his little friends, and then he would be taunted mercilessly and probably shunned.
Life was bleak for these families even before AIDS entered their lives. Most are from blighted sections of New York City's Bronx borough. Some live in crime-infested public housing projects, others in homeless shelters.
"I like the feeling of security," said Linda, a former crack addict infected with HIV who is at camp with her two sons, one sick, the other free of HIV. "I can scream the word 'AIDS' and nobody is going to run away."
The volunteer counselors have their own reasons for being there.
Allan Stinson, a bearded Californian who tested positive four years ago, says AIDS sufferers are made to feel guilty because of the kinds of activities associated with the virus: homosexual sex and intravenous drug use. But who could be more blameless than these children?
"As a person with AIDS, you feel like you did something to get the disease," he said. "I wanted my innocence back."
Copyright 1991/The Associated Press. Reproduced with permission. Reproduction of this article (other than one copy for personal reference) must be cleared through the Permissions Desk, The Associated Press, 50 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020.
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