The Miami Herald, Inc.; Monday, June 23, 1997
Juan O. Tamayo; Herald Staff Writer

TEXT: ANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic - First of two parts

The Catholic nun leaned over and with the back of her hand softly stroked the cheek of the young woman dying of AIDS, 20 years old and no more than 70 pounds.

"How beautiful! How sweet!" the nun said as the woman, Milagros Sanchez, smiled weakly and fondled the package of cookies the nun had brought to her dark and dingy home, a one-room shack with a dirt floor and zinc roof.

It was only after she left the shack that Mother Maria del Carmen Abenia, a 67-year-old Spaniard from an order devoted to helping prostitutes, allowed herself to express her anguish.

"Such suffering! I don't know how I survive these visits. Only with the strength of God, of course," she said.

Fourteen years into an AIDS epidemic that is still spreading, Mother Maria's nuns and a handful of volunteer groups remain the main combatants in a battle that the Dominican government has been slow to help fight.

With 3,700 recorded AIDS deaths and up to 220,000 people estimated to be HIV-positive, this nation of seven million people has the fourth worst epidemic ratein the hemisphere, behind Haiti, Honduras and Mexico.

Entire population at risk

The virus has now jumped the boundaries of traditionally affected groups such as prostitutes and homosexuals, and is claiming more victims among young heterosexual men and especially women, Dominican experts said.

Their prediction, unless the trend changes: 250,000 HIV-positive Dominicans by the year 2000, some 50,000 orphans since 1985 and 14,000 new cases of tuberculosis.

"It's no longer an epidemic limited to certain groups. Now it's really out there in the population. Everybody in the country is at risk," said Martha Butler, director of a U.S.-funded program for HIV prevention and detection.

One of the poorest nations in the hemisphere, the Dominican Republic has been overwhelmed by the spread of the disease. The government's main AIDS-education agency, PROCETS, has a monthly activities budget of less than $7,000.

Officials also worry that publicity about AIDS will hurt tourism, the nation's key industry. "The politically correct thing in this country is to shut up about AIDS because you're hurting the economy," Butler said.

`Go running, sister'

The budget vacuum is being filled, but only minimally, with foreign donations by volunteer groups such as the sisters from the Religiosas Adoratrices, a Spanish order whose 1,800 members are solely devoted to helping prostitutes in missions from India to Morocco and England.

Mother Maria recalled that she was working in Madrid in 1986 when she asked a priest who was visiting the Dominican Republic, long known as a focus of prostitution, to check whether the order should open a mission here.

She smiles when she remembers the priest's reply: "Go running, sister."

They found a country with an estimated 100,000 regular prostitutes and uncounted more who work when their refrigerators are empty.

Mother Maria, a nun for 43 years, and seven sisters eventually settled into one of their more unusual mission headquarters, an abandoned municipal incinerator in a rough Santo Domingo neighborhood.

They would go out evenings to notorious hangouts like La Feria and Calle Duarte and in their spotless white habits troll for women, gay men and transvestites who wanted help getting off the streets.

The poorest of the poor

Today, 17 sisters are helping 82 former prostitutes learn job skills, and get medical treatment and meals. They also run a day-care center for 62 children, so that the mothers don't have to walk the streets.

"They are all daughters of God. But we know we can't fill their heads with talk of God without first filling their stomachs with rice," said Sister Maria Gladix Molina, 53, a Colombian who joined the order at the age of 20.

AIDS exploded into a public issue here in 1988, when reported cases of AIDS/HIV infections nearly doubled, and the sisters began making special efforts to succor affected prostitutes.

"They are the poorest of the poor, abandoned by families and neighbors and left to die alone," said Mother Maria, recounting the awful death toll at her mission: "Six in 1995. Three in '96 and, thank God, only one this year."

The sisters are now caring for 18 HIV-positive women at the mission and visit the homes of those too sick to come in.

"This is a place where we can get a little money, a little medicine, a little rest," said Clara Jimenez, 37, who got the report she was HIV-positive the same day last October that her boyfriend died of AIDS. Luckily, she said, a previous case of syphilis had left her unable to have children.

Her boyfriend's relatives still deny he died of AIDS, she said. "It's a shameful disease, even here," added Jimenez, one of four HIV-positive women referred to the mission recently by a prostitutes' self-help group.

The nuns discreetly give the HIV-positive women extra medical checkups in their mission's clinic, transportation money to attend classes like sewing and painting, and extra groceries to help them stay healthy.

"Doctors say to stop working because the stress makes things worse, but we're poor and if we stop working we die faster," said Caren Gonzalez, 33, who learned in July that she and her 2-year-old daughter are HIV-positive.

True grit

The real test of the sisters' devotion begins when the women grow too weak to come to their center, when hospitals will no longer admit them and doctors and even relatives no longer touch them.

The sisters and a lay volunteer from Italy are now visiting four such cases, including Milagros Sanchez and a 10-year-old boy dying from the virus he got from his mother, a prostitute who died two years ago.

Milagros, whose name means Miracles in Spanish, knows she needs one to live. She has had anemia and diarrhea for eight months, and has lost so much weight that it's impossible to recognize her as the chubby 12-year-old girl, dressed as a gypsy for Mardi Gras, in the photo that hangs near her bed.

Her mother and two siblings work, so Milagros spends her day in bed in a shack with a tin roof that makes it a virtual oven during the day. A bucket of water on the dirt floor lets Milagros sponge herself when it gets too hot.

Her only relief from the tedium of living and the horror of dying are the sisters and the Italian volunteer who visit each week, bringing her vitamins, antibiotics, bedclothes, food and even the three dolls on her bed.

The smallest is Wilkito, a six-inch ball of pink fuzz and big-button eyes, a gift from Mother Maria. "It's my favorite," Milagros whispers, bringing it to her chest and stroking its face just as the sister had done to hers.

Milagros' racking cough makes her aunt back off a few paces. But Mother Maria hugs the girl.

She'll bring a cardboard fan on the next visit so Milagros does not have to sponge herself to relieve the heat, the sister promises. And she'll bring her favorite kind of breakfast cereal.

Does she need anything else? "A radio. To listen to church music," the woman whispers. Not salsa or some other dance music, she is asked by another visitor. "No. This is the music I need right now."

A decent burial

By the time Milagros' pain is over, Mother Maria and the rest of the sisters may be called on to do much more, to do for her what they have done for many others before.

They wash and dress the corpses of AIDS victims whose relatives refuse to touch them. They buy simple wooden coffins, put rosaries and religious pictures inside and pay for the cemetery plots.

"The government here does nothing for us," said a sobbing Maria Vidal, 40, a woman at the sisters' mission who found out she was HIV-positive only two months before her boyfriend died last year.

All but bankrupt, the public health system does little for people sick with AIDS, or any other disease for that matter.

Hospitals send patients with full-blown AIDS home to die because of a shortage of beds. The government does not pay for immune system-boosting drugs like AZT. And most government doctors refuse to treat HIV-positive patients.

"It's sad to admit, but if the government can't afford to supply doctors with latex gloves, you can't blame the doctors for refusing to treat HIV patients," said Martha Butler of the U.S.-funded AIDSCAP.

HIV screening procedures at government clinics and hospitals are so limited that experts estimate 30 percent to 70 percent of all cases go unreported, added Butler.

President Leonel Fernandez "has tried hard to make this a health priority, but we have to recognize we have only limited resources," said Dr. Luis Martinez, who heads the government's Program for the Control of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and AIDS.

Teaching self-respect

It is in the middle of such a wrenching crisis that the Religiosas Adoratrices, founded in Madrid in 1856 by a noblewoman later canonized as St. Maria Micaela, ply their vocation in Santo Domingo and three other Dominican cities. Their full name: The Worshiping Sisters, Slaves to the Holy Sacrament and Charity.

The mission teaches the women skills such as sewing, hairdressing and baking, and puts some of them to work full time folding boxes, an enterprise the sisters launched in cooperation with a printing firm nearby.

Mother Maria, white-haired, blue-eyed and a stocky 5 feet 3, is the dynamo, power-walking her way around the mission headquarters as she shows off its clinics, kitchen, pharmacy, offices for psychologists and social workers.

When three box folders try to hide from a photographer, Mother Maria upbraids them. "Don't hide!" she shouts at them with a broad smile. "Be proud that you have rehabilitated yourselves and left the streets."

It is only at the end of a tough day, like the day she visited Milagros for what may be her last time, that the smile leaves her face and the poverty that rules the lives of those she helps seems to get to her.

"Look at these kids," she says, pointing to a shoeshine boy of about 10, wearing filthy shorts and shoes with no laces. "No money for food or school, their mothers working the streets or sick.

"What else can they do but become bums or criminals? What else can the girls do but look for men who will pay them?

"Our order's special charisma is to work with these women," Mother Maria adds with a sigh. "It is God's love that brings them to us, God's love that brings us to them, and God's love that helps even one of these women."

HOW TO HELP

Donations to assist the work of the Religiosas Adoratrices may be sent to:

Mother Maria del Carmen Abenia Banco Santander P.O. Box 362589 San Juan, Puerto Rico, 00936-2589 Account Number: 514902693

CAPTION: color photo: Mother Maria tries to cheer Milagros Sanchez who is dying from AIDS (a); photo: Sister Josefa Perera guards the children in the nuns' day-care center (a)

Photos by PETER ANDREW BOSCH / Herald Staff WATCHFUL EYE: Sister Josefa Perera guards the children in the nuns' day-care center as they wait for their parents to pick them up.

PETER ANDREW BOSCH / Herald Staff A COMFORTING PRESENCE: Mother Maria tries to cheer Milagros Sanchez, a 20-year-old dying from AIDS contracted from her husband, who already has died.

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