Katie, 24
What I Want You to Know:
It's not just gay men in San Francisco and women and babies in Africa who can get AIDS. Wake up!
Why I think it's important to challenge HIV/AIDS stereotypes:
It still blows me away, 25 years into the epidemic, how many stereotypes Americans hold about AIDS and HIV positive people. Stereotypes about who can get AIDS, who has AIDS and why, feed into the continued spread of the disease and continued discrimination against people living with HIV.
How HIV/AIDS has affected my life:
The first person living with HIV that really affected my life was a woman named Mama Katele, a 50-something year old Congolese grandmother living in a refugee camp in Zambia. There was incredibly high stigma in the refugee camp around AIDS and she was brave enough to become the first openly-HIV positive person in the camp of 25,000 people. She died a few weeks after I met her. After having met people in the US who had been living with HIV for 20 years, it seemed so incredibly unfair that Mama Katele died for lack of drugs, a doctor, and the money to access them.
How I contribute to the fight against HIV:
I've spent two years working with AIDS support groups in Zambia and Rwanda. The organization I co-founded, FACE AIDS, raises money and awareness on college campuses across the country for people living with AIDS.
