One minute, they were hanging out at the Latino grocery store or the neighborhood park or the laundromat on a Monday morning, talking soccer or sex or about la familia back home.
The next? They were in the brightly colored waiting room of a medical clinic, legs bouncing in nervous jitters, waiting for the verdict.
Positive or negative?
For more and more Latino men, HIV tests have come back positive, a trend bucking the slow decrease in the rest of the District’s population.
This is the next, scary health calamity waiting to explode in our midst. And I bet most of us have no idea.
It was only a few years ago that we learned the nation’s capital is also the nation’s HIV/AIDS capital, with an infection rate that rivals some West African countries.
So the city upped its education and outreach across the District. Today, you see HIV/AIDS ads, primarily targeting black men and women, that dispel decades-old myths that this epidemic is about gay, white men. The focus is on the population with the highest rate of infection.
Some of that really worked.
New cases of HIV/AIDS are down by as much as 50 percent over the past two years, according to the study released this month.
With one exception.
The proportion of positive tests is highest among Latino men in their 20s, and those rates are creeping up every year.
Latinos make up 8 percent of the District’s population and 5 percent of those infected with HIV/AIDS. Nationwide, Latinos went from being 15 percent of the nation’s new HIV/AIDS cases in 1985 to 21 percent in 2009, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
It’s even more worrisome to think that in Virginia and Maryland, the level of testing, outreach and education in the growing Latino population is not comparable to what the District does.
And that brings us to the laundromats and grocery stores. And nightclubs, even.
Monday was National HIV/AIDS Testing Day, and counselors were dragging men in from all over.
Outreach workers from La Clinica del Pueblo in the District held “charlas,” or little chats, with men who fit the vulnerable demographic. Then they got the men to a clinic, where they waited for their results.
Some of these guys were lured in by a free T-shirt or small gift card from Target that outreach workers peddled on the street in exchange for their mouth swab. Many of them are here in the states alone, sending money back home to their wife and kids. Many have strayed, and it took a charla from an outreach worker to convince them they could be infected.
In the waiting room, I asked them if they wanted to talk.
I got vigorous head shakes; one guy even jumped out of his chair and darted into the hallway away from me.
Kicking back in his chair, a 32-year-old with a ponytail gave me the cool-pose head nod and said he’d talk to me.
He was last tested in October. Negative. Whew.
“But I’ve done some things since then,” he confided.
“What things?” I asked.
He shook his head no. He wasn’t going to tell, of course.
But he got the message, that he should take a test. His friends? Not so much.
“There’s a lack of knowledge. Lots of guys have no idea they could even get AIDS,” he told me.
A lot of these folks are immigrants who never got the sensitive ads or educational information that comes with growing up in America. They arrive with old-country information.
“When it comes to Latinos, there are lots of taboos out there,” said Miguel Mejia, an HIV counselor who works primarily with Latino youth through La Clinica and the Whitman-Walker Clinic.
“Parents aren’t talking about sex,,” he said. “And there is the taboo of homosexuality. And there is immigration” — concern about running afoul of immigration officials.
The misinformation runs deep.
Some believe if you test positive, you’ll be deported. (Not anymore.)
Or if you use two condoms, you’re safe. (Not the case; two condoms cause rubber-on-rubber friction and often break).
If you halt sex at a certain point, you’re fine. (Nope)
Or if you’re married, you can’t get AIDS. (Ha!)
So outreach workers try to tell folks about safe sex and proper condom use and try to get them to take a test.
At first, they recoil at Juan Carlos Loubriel, the health advocate from Whitman-Walker Clinic who hangs out at grocery stores trying to talk to folks in Spanish about HIV.
“No, not me,” they tell him. But then he’s back the next month, and they take a pamphlet. Then maybe next month they’ll take a condom. Then, eventually, they’ll step into the van he’s got waiting outside and take a test.
“Some people look at me like, ‘You’re talking about HIV? Still?’ ” Loubriel said, with an eye roll. “Yes, we still have to talk about it!”
The advertising campaigns and programs aren’t tailored to the growing Latino population and the rising HIV levels among them, said Catalina Sol, chief programs officer at La Clinica. “It’s just a translation into Spanish,” she told me.
She has some ideas on ways to get Latinos to take the threat of HIV/AIDS seriously.
“HIV can get in the way of your dreams,” one ad would say.
Or, “You can’t care for your family if you don’t take care of yourself,” Sol said. “Because for many Latinos, it’s not about taking care of yourself. That’s not the culture.”
And sometimes, changing a bit of the culture can be a good thing.