SELENA At five o’clock in the morning, Selena knocked on Susana’s door crying hysterically and begging her to purchase the bag of clothes and sheets she was carrying. The day before, she had tested positive for HIV and didn’t have any money to get to the capital for treatment. Susana brought her inside, made her …
GISELE, JEANNY, REMY, MARIE Gisele lives with her family just minutes from Batey Cojobal. Her story is like so many of BRA’s HIV/AIDS patients. Dominican-born with Haitian parents, she has spent her life in destitute poverty. She has known that she was HIV positive since she was pregnant with the fifth of her eight children, …
MARISELA Marisela sat in the BRA’s mobile clinic wearing a little pink dress, her skinny arms and legs jutting out at sharp angles from her body. Her hair was brittle and orange from malnutrition. She spoke in a raspy voice and her breath was labored. For months she’d been suffering from constant respiratory infections. Yet …
ESMERALDA Twenty-four year old Esmeralda Pierre has three beautiful, dimple-cheeked children. She was already eight months pregnant with her youngest when she found out she was HIV positive. Later, I accompanied Esmeralda to Altagracia, the public women’s hospital in Santo Domingo to enroll in the national program for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV. …
ANDRES The blue baseball cap hung from the corner of his bed, the one he always wore driving passengers around town on his motoconcho—small motorcycle, before the chronic diarrhea and weight loss left him too weak to leave his bed. For an hour, I would encourage him to drink the calorie and protein-rich shake I’d …
JEAN-CLAUDE Jean-Claude Delinua, an immigrant from Haiti, came to the Dominican Republic 11 years ago to cut sugar cane. In March, after he had been sick for 8 months, his HIV-infected neighbor, Yasaira Calpio, told the Batey Relief Alliance (BRA) about him. When BRA workers first visited his tiny shed, he was confined to this …
YASAIRA Yasaira Calpio, 28, lives in this one-room shack in Gonzalo Municipality in the Dominican Republic, an area near Monte Plata that has endless hectares of old sugar cane fields that have gone to weed. A mother of three, Calpio last year learned that she had become infected with HIV; fortunately, she had a doctor …
JEAN MICHEL Jean Michel came to BRA’s clinic at Batey Cojobal for the first time in February 2006 with Yahaira, one of BRA’s community-based health promoters, and tested positive for HIV. He was losing weight rapidly and was sick with parasites. To get to Jean Michel’s house, Chitra Akileswaran, another BRA volunteer, and I climbed …
