Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 3, 1994 TAG: 9407050003
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: E-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Elizabeth Sthrother editorial writer
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Oh, this is your purse," she blurted as understanding dawned, and she reached down and pulled up another: same colors, remarkably similar style. We laughed.
Now I was sitting across from her in the cubbyhole she shares with Mary Simpson in a small office of the AIDS Council of Western Virginia, and I was experiencing that sense of unreality one feels when, like Melissa, you've grabbed something familiar, opened it and tried to see at first what you carelessly assumed would be there, only slowly grasping that the contents are unexpected.
Melissa and Mary, both of whom are black, are health educators for the AIDS Council. It's part-time work, technically - Mary is also a full-time social worker, Melissa a part-time counselor for the anonymous AIDS/HIV testing clinic at the city Health Department. But it doesn't take long to realize AIDS education is a life's work, a mission, for both. Melissa volunteers as an educator for the Red Cross, and both are in Cohort, a group of volunteers who work to prevent AIDS, teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases through education.
Mary used to be a probation and parole officer in Iowa. Melissa used to be a heroin addict in Washington, D.C.
I felt that brief disconnect for just an instant as I absorbed this. "You don't fit my stereotype of a heroin addict," I admitted. We had been talking about stereotypes and the difficulty reaching people who don't worry about AIDS because no one they know looks like they would have it. Because they themselves don't look like they would have it.
Melissa understood my surprise. She is "Doll Baby" in her family, the youngest child of loving parents who had her when they were older. She is chatty, laughs easily, exudes warmth and openness; a special person. She also is, always will be, a recovering heroin addict. She's been clean for five years.
She was not deprived emotionally. She left home and Roanoke for the first time when she went off to college, a "high-spirited," "very adventuresome" young woman. She quit school in Tennessee and moved to D.C., intending to transfer to Howard University but instead getting a job and starting on a 15-year addiction.
"In my day, heroin was the drug of choice," and now it's coming around again, she said. "I had no idea when I started using heroin that it was addictive." At least, she did not believe it would addict her. Those people on the street, held in thrall by drugs - she would never be one of them. And for maybe 10 years, she fooled everyone, even herself.
She worked. She kept herself up, paid attention to appearances. She didn't prostitute herself. She simply spent what she earned on heroin. "In my mentality, I had no problem."
She is not unique, Mary assured me. "You could find a whole lot of people in top jobs who are using."
Then, Melissa said, "It got to the point where the drugs were taking over my mind." Her salvation was Narcotics Anonymous, and a spiritual reawakening. "It's only by the grace of God, and I mean that, that I'm here today."
She said she is not HIV-positive, but her experiences as an intravenous drug user give her credibility among people increasingly at risk: African-American women who are abusing drugs, or who are with men abusing drugs. She doesn't talk to them about what she has read in a book; she talks about what she knows.
In a backlash against pouring resources into AIDS research, some conservative commentators maintain the gay community is exaggerating the spread of the disease among heterosexuals, trying to "normalize" it to ensure support for continued funding. It is still overwhelmingly a disease of gay men and intravenous drug users, they say. This is true, the AIDS Council workers told me, only if you limit the statistics to people with full-blown AIDS. If you include people who are HIV-positive, who are in the AIDS pipeline, as it were, the picture is different.
Nationwide, they said, the groups with the fastest-growing rate of HIV infection are black women and adolescents. A Cohort fact sheet reports that in Virginia, more than half the women with AIDS are African-American, and in Roanoke, more than 40 percent of AIDS cases and 53 percent of HIV-infected people are African-American.
The disease is spreading among the young because of that false sense of invulnerability that comes with youth. And why among black women? It has been perceived as a gay disease, and "black men aren't gay," Melissa and Mary said wryly, almost in one voice. More stereotypes - about the disease, about its victims - and deadly ones.
So they are women with a mission, doing work they know is important - and is sometimes even fun. They do traditional outreach work - speaking before groups, passing out literature - but they get to be creative. They throw home-health parties in homes, offices, dorms to teach groups of women everything they always wanted to know about safer sex, but were afraid to ask. They're sort of like Tupperware parties, Melissa explained - food, demonstrations, door prizes.
There is no need for anyone else ever to get AIDS, she said passionately - not with all that is known about how to avoid it. (And, yes, the literature they freely distribute makes it clear the only sure way to avoid getting or giving HIV is to abstain from sex and to not inject drugs.) So it is her job and Mary's to drive the message home to people who may have assumed it was not meant for them, or have taken refuge in denial, or have felt powerless to do anything to lessen their risk.
It is dangerous to look at a mate, or at yourself, and insist on seeing only the outside of the pocketbook if you have the slightest doubt about what might be inside. Melissa wants you to know the hours of the free, anonymous HIV antibodies testing at the Roanoke Health Department: every Monday, 3-6 p.m. Over her desk is an eye-catching poster, the drawing African or styled after African art, the proverb Ethiopian: "He who conceals his disease cannot expect to be cured." There's no cure for AIDS, but there is help.
by CNB