The Associated Press - Saturday, Aug. 26, 2000
Dan Perry, Associated Press Writer

"Once (people) know you are HIV or have AIDS they don't look at you," she said in a soft Caribbean lilt. "I was ashamed and I felt alone and I didn't want anyone to know."

The man she loved infected Taylor, a mother of two, and two of her relatives. Now they are among hundreds of thousands infected with the AIDS virus in the Caribbean, a region that has done little to stem the spiraling epidemic - out of ignorance, lack of funds and, some say, fear of scaring tourists away.

Taylor, a striking, articulate 27-year-old, agonized about telling her tale; the stigma of AIDS is powerful in Trinidad, an island of 1.3 million people where popular attention focuses on cricket and on worsening ethnic feuds - not on AIDS.

Eventually, however, she decided she must help shatter the public's denial and came to tell her story in a windowless office over grimy storefronts. In the face of regional apathy, AIDS advocacy groups have high hopes that an international AIDS conference being held in Barbados on Sept. 11-12 will put the Caribbean AIDS epidemic - second only to Africa's - on the global agenda. They also hope to raise $35 million from the world's rich nations.

Peggy McEvoy, Caribbean leader for the UNAIDS organization cosponsoring the conference, says the region's official tally of 360,000 people infected is woefully understated. "We presume a half million people are infected. It's off the charts."

Excluding Cuba, where extensive testing and prevention keep rates low, the Caribbean has around 25 million people. That means one in 50 may be infected - four times the U.S. rate. As in Africa a decade ago, there is growing incidence among women, heterosexuals, children and young people. Poverty is a factor. Haiti, the hemisphere's poorest country, also has the highest infection rate, more than 5 percent of adults.

Equally important are a complex of destructive societal norms, experts say, including early sexual experience, taking multiple partners, a religious bent discouraging discussion of sex and a distaste among men toward condoms and submissiveness by women who don't insist on them. Virulent homophobia also induces bisexuals to lead secret double lives and causes people to assume wrongly that AIDS is mainly confined to the gay community.

Governments, with exceptions like the rich Bahamas, seem overwhelmed. In Trinidad, the National AIDS Program director, Muriel Douglas, says her annual budget is just $100,000, much of it spent on pamphlets informing parents about their children's sexuality. Only some pregnant mothers are helped with AIDS medicines.

"Our hope is to start treating all HIV patients," says Trinidad's chief medical officer, Rawle Edwards. "Right now it has an exorbitant cost." Ozzi Warwick, a Trinidadian coordinator for UNAIDS, laments the public's apathy about the epidemic and the lack of spending. "If this continues the way it's going we could be wiped off the face of the Earth."

In Trinidad, one of the few to admit publicly to being HIV positive is gay activist Godfrey Sealey. The 41-year-old playwright became infected 17 years ago in the United States and has since written many highly acclaimed plays about AIDS.

"Our leaders are megalomaniacs, power-hungry, money-grubbing capitalists without any vision," he says, sitting on a plastic chair in his sparse apartment. The public, he says, demand little change, as they think AIDS affects primarily gays, prostitutes and drug abusers.

Sealey hopes to inspire others because he looks healthy and unhobbled, far younger than his years. Through a maze of connections that a lucky few call "the medicine underground," he has access to expensive anti-retrovirals that can delay the onset of AIDS.

Dawn Catherine Yearwood has no such luck.

The housecleaner and sometime prostitute comes from the poverty that plagues the Caribbean, tucked away behind the beaches and the stately homes, festering in roadside huts.

Early this year, during Trinidad's famously raucous Carnival, she ventured out to dance while the steel bands played. Two men who gave her drinks, she says, raped her and didn't wear a condom. Now she is pregnant and HIV positive.

She still meets men and has sex, she says.

"Sometimes I don't tell them I am HIV 'cause I'm afraid they kill me. Sometimes I tell them and they don't want to use a condom anyway." Asked her age, she says she doesn't know and fishes an identity card from the pile. The document, a last vestige of normalcy in a shattered life, reveals she is 37.

"Look at the picture!" she insists.

It is unmistakably her. Younger. Prettier. Smiling.

The story of Shakur Jameson, among the growing legion of children born with HIV, is told in handwritten script in a notebook. Date of birth: Sept. 9, 1997. Date confirmed, date baptized, date admitted to the Cyril Ross Home for children with HIV/AIDS. The eye is drawn to a terrible word, written horizontally across the entry in red: "Deceased."

"He was one of the strong ones," Jacqueline John, the home's head attendant, said of the boy who died in June at the age of two. "Very active. There were no signs of disease. One day, after his bath and breakfast, he asked to lie down. On the floor; they like the coldness. By the time I found him there was nothing."

Holding a little girl with emaciated limbs, John says Shakur's death taught a lesson: "Look after the strong ones! The weak ones you mind anyway."

Almost 30 children, from toddlers to a 12-year-old, live in the clean and functional home with a doctor's office, playroom, classroom, orderly bunkrooms. Outside there are swings and a bright toy jeep on the roof.

What's missing is the medicine. Less than half the children receive donated treatments. There is no support beyond the $8,000 a month given by a Catholic foundation, director Steve Solomon says.

So activists struggle with little financing. Beverly King's Rap Port project teaches young people about AIDS prevention and misconceptions such as "drinking bleach can prevent HIV."

A friend introduced Jemma Taylor to Rap Port, and from there she found her way to the support group CARE. She was inspired by co-founder Catherine Williams, 45, a longtime HIV carrier.

"The fact that she lived for 17 years and is still living, it gives me so much encouragement," Taylor says. "And then to actually go to the CARE meetings and watch everybody - thin, fat, young, old - I had been hearing so much about AIDS and HIV and how it can affect anybody, but for the first time I was seeing it."

She's back using the main road, no longer trying to avoid people.

"Now I dress myself, I make sure I's looking pretty, and I walk through there," she says, "and to hell with whatever people want to say."
000826
AP000811

Copyright © 2000 - Associated Press. Reproduction of this article (other than one copy for personal reference) must be cleared through the AP Permissions Desk.

AEGiS is a 501(c)3, not-for-profit, tax-exempt, educational corporation. AEGiS is made possible through unrestricted funding from Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, Elton John AIDS Foundation, National Library of Medicine, Pacific Life Foundation, and donations from users like you.

Always watch for outdated information. This article first appeared in 2000. This material is designed to support, not replace, the relationship that exists between you and your doctor.

AEGiS presents published material, reprinted with permission and neither endorses nor opposes any material. All information contained on this website, including information relating to health conditions, products, and treatments, is for informational purposes only. It is often presented in summary or aggregate form. It is not meant to be a substitute for the advice provided by your own physician or other medical professionals. Always discuss treatment options with a doctor who specializes in treating HIV.

Copyright ©1980, 2000. AEGiS. All materials appearing on AEGiS are protected by copyright as a collective work or compilation under U.S. copyright and other laws and are the property of AEGiS, or the party credited as the provider of the content. .