Peace Corps volunteer Jesse Lamarre-Vincent to discuss AIDS education in Nambia



With the help of one full-time community counselor, as well as a group of volunteer youth, Lamarre-Vincent was able to create a program that included: one-on-one and group HIV/AIDS counseling, support groups, a community garden, soup kitchen, and an after-school arts and music drop-in center serving between 70 and 100 orphans at any given point in time.

Peace Corps volunteer Jesse Lamarre-Vincent to discuss AIDS education in Nambia

Peace Corps volunteer to discuss AIDS education

Check out complete health coverage from healthology.com

By Michael Keating
mkeating@seacoastonline.com

Caption: Jesse Lamarre-Vincent, center, is a Peace Corps volunteer in Namiba where he works with orphans who have lost their parents to AIDS. From left are Quenie, Mandeleine and Festus.Courtesy photo

Thanks to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, plenty of people now know where Namibia is. That wasn’t the case 19 months ago when Jesse Lamarre-Vincent, 25, of Concord, received his marching orders from the Peace Corps to be stationed in the former German/ South African colony known as South West Africa.

"I had no idea where it was, or that it was even a country," Lamarre-Vincent admitted in a telephone interview last week. After a few days training in the capital city of Windhoek, Lamarre-Vincent was sent north to Oshakati, about one hour from the Angolan border, where he was charged with creating an HIV/AIDS education program aimed primarily at orphans.

"I sort of just made it up as I went," he said.

Twenty-five years ago Monday, the first cases of AIDS were reported in a weekly federal health publication, telling of a mysterious pneumonia among five gay men in Los Angeles. Since then, 40.3 million people have been diagnosed with HIV or AIDS worldwide, and 30 million have died, according to The Associated Press.

Sub-Saharan Africa, which includes Namibia, has just over 10 percent of the world’s population, but is home to more than 60 percent of all people living with HIV - 25.8 million. In 2005, an estimated 3.2 million people in the region became newly infected, while 2.4 million adults and children died of AIDS, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.

By comparison, the United States has an HIV infection rate of 0.6 percent

With the help of one full-time community counselor, as well as a group of volunteer youth, Lamarre-Vincent was able to create a program that included: one-on-one and group HIV/AIDS counseling, support groups, a community garden, soup kitchen, and an after-school arts and music drop-in center serving between 70 and 100 orphans at any given point in time.

Lamarre-Vincent, who is visiting home for his brother’s wedding, will report on these efforts Friday night at South Church in Portsmouth. He’ll share photos of the country and music from the orphaned youth, in an effort to help educate Seacoast residents about Namibia, which currently has a 20 percent HIV/AIDS infection rate, according to the United Nations.

"Our big thing right now is trying to get pregnant mothers with HIV/AIDS to give birth in clinics so we can give them drugs that we hope will drive the transmission rates from 1-in-4, down to 1-in-10," said Lamarre-Vincent. "Namibia has a huge orphan problem as a result of HIV/AIDS - over 120,000 orphans under the age of 15."

The biggest obstacles Lamarre-Vincent is finding to education, especially in the rural villages, are the stigma associated with AIDS and the traditional culture that doesn’t speak openly about sex.

"HIV is a taboo subject," he said. "We have to talk about HIV without talking about sex. We have to do it without offending the head man or elders of the village."

When this story was posted in June 2006, this was on the front page of PCOL:




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