"To pull Jeremiah Johnson from his post is to promote the idea that being HIV positive is bad. That everyone with HIV is somehow separate from the whole, worthy of discrimination, that being HIV positive is something to hide. Does the Peace Corps really want to reinforce abroad what we’ve worked so hard to overcome at home?" Tony D'Souza, author of "Whiteman," served three years in a village in Ivory Coast, where he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching villagers how to prevent HIV/AIDS.
Tony D'Souza writes: I applaud columnist Stephen Barr and the Washington Post for championing the cause of Peace Corps Volunteer Jeremiah Johnson, who was removed from his post in the Ukraine after testing positive for HIV
Tony D'Souza Letter to the Washington Post
I applaud columnist Stephen Barr and the Washington Post for championing the cause of Peace Corps Volunteer Jeremiah Johnson, who was removed from his post in the Ukraine after testing positive for HIV. There are many ugly facets to this case, but the most disturbing is how this action undermines one of the Peace Corps’ most important missions: that of furthering HIV/AIDS awareness and promoting the safety and civil rights of HIV positive people in the developing world.
From 2000 to 2002 I served as an Peace Corps Volunteer in a small Muslim village in Ivory Coast. During my two and a half years there I talked to hundreds of West Africans about HIV/AIDS, rolled countless condoms over a Peace Corps issued wooden penis in public demonstrations. I worked in Worodougou, Dioula, and West African French, saying all the dirty words in those languages, talking endlessly about the most taboo subject for them, for us, for anyone in the world: sex. It was embarrassing all around, and the demonstrations often led to a lot of blushing and laughter. But it was also deadly serious work. At that time, one in four adult Ivoirians was infected with HIV.
I’m happy to report that I met almost no one who had not previously heard about HIV/AIDS; the Ivorian government had literally papered the whole country with billboards warning about the disease. But at the same time, the availability of condoms was nearly nil, many of the young men treated the situation as a dismissible CIA-generated plot. And as to the efficacy of the billboards I’ll recount here a brief list of the questions I was regularly asked: “Can condoms be washed and reused?” “Can I cure myself by sleeping with a virgin?” “Do Americans want to keep black Africans from having children?” “Don’t only bad people get HIV?”
Peace Corps service requires a two year commitment. Knowing this, in training before we were sent to our villages, many of us joked about what we would do when confronted with the question of sex in the field. We were mostly young, and almost everyone was single: we would abstain, we told each other, we would use two condoms, we would only sleep with other Americans. “Who is the prettiest person in our training group?” we asked each other. The familiar refrain became, “Whoever is posted closest to me.”
Reality did not work that way. The locals treated us like rockstars; the locals were beautiful. Certainly economics played a huge roll in it, but that question isn‘t germane: two years is two years, and we lived there for all of it. Most of us had sex with locals, some of us came home with HIV.
In training and in the field, we all met local people who lived openly with the disease. We worked with them, brought them into the villages to show those close-minded rural folk that HIV can strike anyone, good or bad, that the disease is something we must all live with.
America had Ryan White to help us understand, and I was privileged to work alongside the Ryan Whites of West Africa. How brave those people were. The stigma attached to the disease was in full force in Ivory Coast at that time, prejudice the order of the day. And yet there they were, a housewife, a teacher, a mechanic, all of them willing to stand in front of the masses and proclaim their HIV positive status.
We learned this lesson in America twenty years ago. That Jeremiah Johnson should be brought home because of HIV is an embarrassing step backward for an organization that is one of the few positive things America has going for it in the world. How could I have spent those years of my life telling every African I met that HIV is something we must not fear, when the very organization supporting my work undercuts the mission in this way?
In retrospect, I have often been conflicted about the “good” I did in West Africa. Yes, I did tell many people how to protect themselves from HIV, but I also did it in a place that did not really allow them this opportunity. What condoms were available were prohibitively expensive, and often a young man or woman would say to me, “I wasn’t afraid until I heard you speak. But now I know that I will die. How can I protect myself when there are no condoms? I will never get an HIV test because if I find out I am positive, then I will lose the will to live and I will die right away. Too many children depend on me. So I will never get a test.”
To pull Jeremiah Johnson from his post is to promote the idea that being HIV positive is bad. That everyone with HIV is somehow separate from the whole, worthy of discrimination, that being HIV positive is something to hide. Does the Peace Corps really want to reinforce abroad what we’ve worked so hard to overcome at home?
A message we can all believe in would be to reinstate Jeremiah Johnson, let him serve as an HIV positive Volunteer, to tell the world that HIV is so unworthy of stigma in American eyes that someone with HIV can represent us abroad as a Peace Corps Volunteer. What message would be more potent? Unless, of course, it’s not true.
--Tony D’Souza
