On Sunday, May 20th,
approximately 45,000 people converged in the streets of Manhattan for the AIDS
Walk NY, and I am honored to have been one of them. Walkers and wheelers of all ages and all ethnicities trekked
10 kilometers through Central Park and around the West Side, each of us with
our own stories in every step.
We passed
volunteers who shouted at us from the opposite side of the caution tape to
“keep walking” and blew encouraging whistles in our direction. There were also
tourists and NYC residents who joined us for a bit, curious and overwhelmed by
the number of people walking. “What
are you fighting for?” I remember one woman yelling at us from the sidewalk. “It’s the AIDS walk,” a man next to me
answered, “we’re walking for awareness and a cure.”
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| Photo by Kyle Sweet |
Each person had a
story to tell, and we heard a few of them as we stopped to take footage. My fellow intern and walker Kyle, brought
along his camera and stopped to ask questions of people we wanted to know more
about. Some participants were
walking for the twelfth time. There
were families with names of loved ones on their T-shirts, and co-workers who
walked for companies that supported AIDS research. Many walkers with their children and dogs, walked
hand-in-hand, and held up banners proclaiming where they came from, and who
they were walking for. Others,
like me, joined the fight for AIDS awareness recently, and this was our first
walk.
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| Photo by Kim J. Ford for Lionqueen192 Productions, Inc. |
For me, being
surrounded by so many veterans of previous AIDS walks was powerful and also
intimidating. Was my brief
encounter with this passionate world substantial enough that I was qualified to
walk next to people who had seen their lovers and loved ones die from AIDS? I was not alive when many of the walkers
watched half of their friends contract a mysterious and deadly virus. I have no way of knowing the pain fellow
walkers felt when they discovered, years later, that their son’s, boyfriend’s,
or grandmother’s HIV had finally morphed into AIDS, which was, at that time, a death
sentence.
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| Photo by Kyle Sweet |
As I counted the
number of AIDS Walk NY pins on the back of one man’s vest, I was reminded again
of how the fight has changed since the first walk, in 1986. Today, people
diagnosed with HIV who receive treatment can expect to live almost as long as a
person not diagnosed with the disease. However, if a person doesn’t know she’s HIV positive, doesn’t
get tested, or doesn’t tell her partners about the diagnosis, she could spread
HIV by not protecting herself and others. When I think about how little most people know about HIV/AIDS
and the importance of protection, the fight remains the same. Everyone needs to know what happens when
you neglect your body and sexual health, and what fights still need our
attention. Today, there are 33
million people living with HIV, and only 3 million are getting treatment. Even with these statistics,
unfortunately, according to a 2009 National Aids Strategy Coordinating
Committee Report shows that the American
public has become increasingly less concerned with HIV/AIDS.
Yesterday, there
were many, many people who raised money and walked for the cause, but there
were so many more people who were not there. Few of my peers and friends at home and at school knew that I
was walking, and none of them were at the walk with me. In my health class in high school, HIV/AIDS
was a 30-minute PowerPoint lecture, mostly about how deadly HIV/AIDS used to be.
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| Photo by Kim J. Ford for Lionqueen192 Productions, Inc. |
HIV/AIDS
prevention and awareness is not an issue that my friends and I discuss when we
hang out. To our generation,
HIV/AIDS is archaic and a none-issue; most people are under the impression that
AIDS now has a cure. That needs to
change. If we are to live in a
safer, healthier, more conscious world, our generation of YouTube-watching,
Facebook-stalking teens needs to know that kids our age are still being
diagnosed with HIV, and even more of those teens simply do not know how to
prevent the disease or how to get tested. And that is what I walked for Sunday: I walked as a promise
to get the word out, to get my friends to be aware of the current fight, and to
get more young people behind the AIDS fight. Even though I’m not a long-time walker, and even though I
don’t have as many stories to tell, I was as much a part of the AIDS Walk as
anyone else because I’m determined to get the word out.
Remember: no
matter how you get down, protect yourself. Get tested.
Check out this
HIV/AIDS photo retrospective:
--Virginia Marshall
GET DOWN Youth Blogger
@vrosemarshall
virginiarosemarshall@college.harvard.edu
