Jill Campbell Mackay speaks to an AIDS sufferer about the discrimination she has to put up with in daily life
THEY say by the time you reach sixty, you have the face you deserve. Poppy is 63 and displays wholly undeserved almost skull like features; dull eyes are set into prominent sockets, thin papery skin is pulled taut over her cheek bones and rarely during our meeting do the sides of her mouth turn upwards to deliver even a glimmer of a smile.
Poppy encapsulates a tragedy, she could be a woman anywhere and has one thing in common with 18 million other woman in the world: she is living with HIV/AIDS. After her husband was diagnosed with full-blown AIDS, Poppy got tested.
AIDS is a disease which many feel will never threaten their front door, and is still in Cyprus after all these years regarded by many as a danger only to homosexuals or those who have liaisons with people from certain parts of the world.
This blinkered attitude, Poppy believes, could bring a potentially disastrous health crisis to the island; she wants HIV/AIDS to be at the forefront of peoples minds. “It can happen to a member of your family, as it did to mine,” she said. “I watched my husband die a terrible death from the disease, the diagnosis came too late for him. I have managed, through a cocktail of medication and a good doctor in Larnaca, to hold at bay the inevitable, although I suffer from recurrent illnesses associated with my immune system being so under attack, and I am very tired most of the time. But, I fight on, trying to make sure others are saved from this terrible disease, I believe the government is hiding the true size of the problem, it is treated as just a spark, but, believe me, it will soon become a big fire.”
“I loved my husband, yes he visited the cabaret, but, by the time I found out about this, he was already failing fast and was in great pain. Then, all I wanted to do was to help him, care for him, and no, there were no recriminations on my part, I didn’t have the time to sit and feel sorry for myself, I felt too much sorrow for him and our two young children who were going to be left without a father. I was with my husband through all the stages, right up until his death.”
So having seen for herself how the virus destroyed her husband’s body and the pain and discomfort he suffered how does Poppy cope?
“My children kept me alive at the time and they are still keeping me alive now. I knew I couldn’t crack because then, they were very young and needed a mother’s love. Through this need I gained the strength to keep on going, but things didn’t get any easier for me or for my children, because we then had to face all the bigotry thrown at us by neighbours, from so-called friends and even some family members. I never ever hid from the disease, I was open about it, I had it, and I just had to live with it, unfortunately it was others around me who couldn’t live with it and that’s where we, as a family, had our very worst times.
“Our landlord tried to evict us from our house. I fought that and won, then my children were asked to stay away from primary school because other parents didn’t want their children sitting near them or playing with them, so I fought that and won. These days I don’t need to be accepted but I do need my children, who are perfectly healthy, to be openly accepted and so be able to live a normal life. They have, over the years, been shunned by their piers, humiliated by teachers and become social outcasts, which had has left a terrible mark on them.
“It’s hard enough these days for teenagers to grow strong and straight without having the added stigma of a father dying of AIDS, and a mother who is also infected.
“Even now, when my teenage daughter goes out for a coffee with friends if she sits beside a male friend for an innocent chat, there’s always some boys who will, in front of her, tell the boy she comes from an ‘AIDS infected family’.
“It’s so much more difficult for my children. I won’t give in to being bullied, talked about in bad ways, spat at or treated like some leper. I also know families here in Paphos who have the virus, where parents will not even tell their children or vice versa, for fear of all the things that have happened to my family. I understand that people are fearful, and I do not expect to be embraced by everyone. What I want is for people to find more tolerance, to learn how to care about other people again. I can see as a society we have lost that generosity of spirit that once was the pillar of our lives.
“More young people are being diagnosed, especially in the last two years, and even today some doctors will still not deal with AIDS patients. They say they haven’t got the facilities, what they are really saying is they don’t want us in their waiting rooms putting other paying patients off.”
But changing society’s attitudes is a monumental task. “If I can live with this disease, then surely others can live with it and to get that attitude we need more people talking about the disease, we need more education in schools with properly trained people telling youngsters this is a killer disease and you must always have safe sex. If a boy says no to using a condom then girls shouldn’t be pressured into having unprotected sex just to be popular. Being popular these days can kill. I also want women working in cabarets to understand why they have to practise safe sex, if they don’t, then they are, in effect, committing manslaughter when they have sex with a man with no condom.
“I know the same could be said for the man when he passes it on to his wife, that’s the totally disastrous outcome of having a liaison with a professional sex worker. Even though these girls are supposedly given health checks these are not checks that will show whether HIV is present, it might show a negative one week and a positive the next month so waving a certificate around saying you are HIV negative for six months is absolutely no guarantee.”
But are these girls really so niave? “I know all about AIDS and will always use a condom with new clients but, I also have my regulars, and with them there is no risk doing it without a condom as I am the only girl they go with every time they need sex,” one young woman from a Paphos caberet said.
It seems the huge challenge still remains of changing sex workers’ attitudes when it comes to how they perceive not only the disease but the basic nature of man.
Sex and death are still the two great taboos in most cultures, put them together – sex causing death – and you have a stigma doubled. And decent people like Poppy suffer not only the physical pain of the illness but a daily and almost unstoppable raft of unspeakable forms of blatant discrimination, Poppy is dying not just from AIDS but from society’ seeming lack of faith, compassion and understanding.
As I got up to leave, I went to embrace Poppy, kissing on both cheeks. The smallest hint of a smile surfaced as she released me and as I walked out the door she said “Not many people do that to me, thank you.”
