The New York Times - Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Donald G. McNeil Jr.

FOCSANI, Romania - The public face of AIDS in Romania is Christina, a pretty and vivacious 16-year-old. She does television interviews about being H.I.V. positive, appears in schools and sends encouraging e-mail messages to other infected children.

But Christina is not her real name, and her parents do not allow her face to be photographed. Such is the power of prejudice against AIDS patients, especially in rural stretches like the one surrounding this afterthought of a city on the shallow Planu River.

"Even my father doesn't accept my condition," Christina said. "He knows, but he says I have a problem with my liver." Christina has a lot going for her. She speaks four languages and is nearly a straight-A student. She sees a psychologist when she goes to Bucharest for blood tests. One sympathetic teacher and two friends know about her, and Romanian Angels Appeal, a charity, gave her the computer that sits on the desk beneath the Jennifer Lopez and Bon Jovi posters.

She is enterprising and outgoing. Romanian newlyweds consider it good luck to have their pictures taken with strangers; if Christina sees a couple walking out of church, she runs up to offer herself to their camera. They sometimes give her money.

At an AIDS conference for children in Switzerland, she scooped up the free condoms to sell to her classmates. In Geneva, she used her real name and went shopping wearing the red ribbon that has become an international symbol of the epidemic. Her mother made her take it off on the plane home.

The secrecy chafes. "Sometimes I want everybody to know how I look," she said, "to show them that I am fine."

But many other young AIDS patients face even harsher realities. Johnny, a bright 15-year-old from another small city, said in an interview in a Bucharest hospital that "other children's parents refused to let me stay in my school once my neighbor told everyone I was sick." In clear English, he described being sent to a boarding school for the sick in Singureni, where classes are geared for his mentally retarded classmates.

The nuns running the school are kind, he said, but when he was out walking once, a local man told him, "If I catch you down this road again, I will beat you up." Christina was probably infected in 1988 as a toddler when she drank some household cleaner, was rushed to a hospital bleeding and had transfusions. The diagnosis finally came when she was 11.

Her parents told her she had hepatitis, but two years later, she found the truth in her mother's diary. When she showed it to her father, he burned it. "But that was good," she said. "I began a new life from that point."

On a "map" of her life she made in Geneva, she draws that moment as a cracked heart. Her present is a face with a smile. Her future is a line that zigzags up and down.

"I'm not scared," she said. "After 18, I have big plans. I want to make an organization. Children grow up. We shall become adults. We are going to fight together."

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