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Once at Front Line of AIDS War, District Is Now Fighting Blind
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Three or four times a week, Patricia, who lives off Alabama Avenue in Southeast Washington, makes her way to the Women's Collective near 14th and U streets NW.
She's 56, a mother of five, HIV positive for 20 years.
There's a lot of shame and for a few years a whole lot of denial, says Patricia, who spoke on the condition that her full name not be used. Only a handful of friends know her secret. So for conversation and health care, she takes a long, meandering bus ride from Southeast to Northwest: about 25 minutes on the 82 line, all the way down near the Anacostia Metro line, then about 45 minutes -- past Capitol Hill, past the D.C. Farmer's Market, past Howard University -- on the 90 line, all the way up Florida Avenue. Sometimes, on the weekends, the trip can last way more than an hour.
She doesn't have her little sister Phyllis anymore. They used to shoot up together in their bedroom, their bathroom, behind the apartment building. Now Phyllis is dead, at 50, gone a few weeks ago from AIDS complications. She had lived long enough to watch her baby, Dyshon, the youngest of nine, die at 6 from the disease. Now Patricia worries about her youngest daughter, who has just taken up with a man she calls a "street hustler."
"He's one of those types. He thinks he's so fine. He thinks he can get anybody," Patricia says. Get tested, she begs her daughter, get tested.
"I'm afraid she's gonna wind up just like her aunt and me," Patricia says of her daughter, who is 20 and has two babies.
Today in the District, AIDS workers say, by the time many of the city's poor residents seek testing or treatment, they already have full-blown AIDS. That's what Patricia Nalls, who founded the Women's Collective, is seeing. Across the Anacostia River in Southeast Washington, Flora Terrell Hamilton, who runs Family & Medical Counseling Service Inc., is witnessing the same thing. Of the more than 1,200 clients getting treatment for HIV/AIDS each year, some are in their twenties, and a few of them already have full-blown AIDS, Hamilton says.
"We need to reinforce our early prevention efforts," she says.
Adds Nalls: "We're not reaching people early enough."
There is no citywide HIV prevention campaign in place targeting District teenagers.
Hamilton says that her group recently went to a high school in Southeast Washington -- she won't name the school -- and gave an HIV test to 100 teenagers. Two came back positive.
