Speakers Bureau
The Speakers Bureau
A listener's first person account
I could hear voices coming from inside as I approached the True Vine Baptist Church on Syracuse’s Southside. It sounded like a lively Sunday service, except it was Saturday afternoon, cold and rainy. The pews were filled and as I stood in the back trying to find a spot to sit, the woman with the microphone said, “…and the only difference between us and you is we got caught.” That was my introduction to the AIDS Community Resources Speakers Bureau.
There were eight speakers: two men and six women. Four were white, three were black, one Hispanic. Their stories were vastly different, but their diagnosis was the same. They were all HIV positive and are now making it their life’s work to spread the prevention message and halt the spread of the HIV/AIDS plague.
By the time HIV positive people develop the gumption to speak in public about their disease, they’ve come to terms with it. But every speaker described a season of despair and misery following diagnosis. One woman said her despondency lasted for two years, that she spent her days planning her funeral, selecting the songs and readings, until her mother admonished that it didn’t matter how she died, what mattered was how she lived. That message got through when nothing else had and now she is a dynamite speaker on the anti-HIV Speakers Bureau.
“HIV doesn’t just jump on you,” she says to the True Vine gathering. “HIV is a disease you can’t just get by standing in this room with somebody. I did all kinds of bad things to get it. I slept around without using condoms. I shared needles when I shot drugs into my system. I knew people I was hanging around with were HIV positive, and still I did those things. I got pregnant and still I didn’t get tested and my baby could have been born HIV positive just like me.” She paused then, not for effect, but to keep her emotions in check, which she does very well. Her story is passionate, spontaneous, and almost revival-like, without the schmooz.
A question from the audience, “What would have stopped you from that behavior? What would have gotten through to you?”
Her pretty black face lost its smile as she thought about the question and then answered honestly, “I knew how dangerous it was, but I had no self esteem. I didn’t feel worthy of anything better. Someone would have had to instill pride and confidence in me, and then I’d never have walked that path of self destruction.”
A young slim speaker had another answer. “If I had known someone who was HIV positive and they would have told me how their lives had changed, I would have listened.”
One of the men picked up the narrative, “My family didn’t want anything to do with me. They thought I was doing drugs.”
Back to the young slim woman…”At first I wished I was a leper instead of having HIV. Because then I might get a hug.” The sad message touched hearts in the little sanctuary with its Ten Commandments and Lord’s Prayer hanging on the walls. A man sitting a few rows back said, “If I were to see you in a grocery store I wouldn’t even know you have HIV. I think you are pretty.”
“Oh, I’m okay now. I feel good. Don’t worry about me. Just understand, it’s very, very hard when you first learn you have the disease that will someday, you hope way off in the future, but will someday kill you.”
Though HIV infection rates are high and on the rise in African American communities, the subject is seldom talked about in Black churches. Reverend Chauncey Brown opened True Vine’s doors to AIDS Community Resources because the AIDS crisis is a calamity for the minority community. “I think we need to talk about this in our churches because it needs to be said. We’ve been scared to talk about sex in church but our people are having sex and some of them are getting sick.”
So talk about sex they did. “Can you get HIV from eating from the same plate as someone who has it?” asks an old man in the third row. Answer: there are four bodily fluids that spread HIV – blood, semen, breast milk and vaginal secretions. HIV is detectible in saliva, but at a very low concentration. It would take one gallon of saliva consumed in one sitting to produce enough of the virus for infection. Each face in the audience grimaced a little trying to come to terms with a gallon of saliva.
Another speaker, a white woman in her fifties, stood up to talk about how she got AIDS. “Certainly not from saliva,” she says. She had been married to the same man for more than 20 years and she was faithful to him. He had not been faithful to her, though, and she developed HIV/AIDS. She was very sick, but went from doctor to doctor and none tested her for HIV/AIDS because she simply didn’t look or act the part. She didn’t engage in any risky behaviors, except perhaps trusting a man who shouldn’t have been trusted. She’s now divorced.
I left as the event was winding down, back out on the street with a different take on the voices still sounding inside True Vine. Strong voices telling authentic stories. Their message powerful, and their motto short and sharp: We can talk about it. Can you?