World AIDS Day 2008

It was almost a decade ago that I began my work in health education as a student assistant in HIV/AIDS and sexual health at my university. My job primarily entailed organising events including the annual Sexual Health Awareness Fair. My university had to be the most conservative, rural Texas, Bible-thumping in the US. And our events always balanced to include all perspectives…it is not fun trying to work on tabling maps with both Planned Parenthood and Crisis Pregnancy Centres.

But it was my mentor during this year that sticks with me…Margaret M. She was an over-weight middle-aged woman with a grown son, who like me had idealistically returned to college later in life. She was like a mother (or grandmother) to these clean-cut, mostly upper middle-class young people who were often away from their home and families for the first time. But unlike most of their mother’s she spoke openly about the risks of unprotected sex. One would think it embarrassing for this woman to pull out condoms and bananas for demonstrations on the proper way to apply protection, but for Margaret it was completely natural.

Of course, our jobs were not without struggles. This major US university in the heart of the Bible-belt refused to even consider the possibility that its students (except those ethnic minorities on the sports teams of course) might drink excessively or have sex…let alone unprotected sex. The director of the health centre demonstrated her lack of support not only by ever present budget cuts but also by the very placement of our offices…in the fartherest corner of the basement. But none of this dampened Margaret’s faith and surety that the message we spread was not only noble but vital…life saving. Each year she trained dozens of peer educators to take the message of safe sex across the campus to over 40,000 young people.

For me though it was the one-on-one talks with this amazing woman that I will forever remember. In her office, she proudly displayed a poster her son had sent her from his latest Army station in Germany…a clothes line of some truly unique condoms…including one that had a chicken head. It was in this setting that we would spend hours discussing not only issues of funding but the global menace of AIDS. I remember clearly the time I spoke to her of my younger sexual exploits and my fear when I had my first HIV test during my second pregnancy. I had explained in my na