Educator advocates World AIDS Day

“How many people here got an HIV test recently?” Andrea Williams asked a lecture room full of students on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day.

Few hands went up. The reality is that there’s less publicity and public concern these days about AIDS and the virus that causes it, HIV. It is still a deadly disease – and an epidemic in many countries and among certain groups of people.

Williams, an AIDS outreach educator from New York, spoke recently to students taking Sociology 389: AIDS: Myths and Realities. Williams contracted HIV in 1993 when there was less awareness of the virus. Since then, Williams has redefined her life and started a family.

For more about World AIDS Day and the United Nations’ campaign against AIDS:
http://www.worldaidscampaign.info/

Williams’ daughter, Amber George, is a student in the course. She said she is no stranger to her mother’s teachings.

“I’d be the friend who always had condoms to pass out,” George said. “There was always pamphlets and brochures laying around the house, and my mother always had me pass them out to my friends.”

After Williams asked the class who got tested recently, she asked if anyone has been having unprotected sex. The students looked around at each other, unwilling to answer the question. George told her mother appallingly, “Mom, no one’s going to answer that!”

Williams used the class’ tepid response as a teachable moment.

“Condoms ? use them,” Williams said. “Better yet, don’t have sex. It’s the safest sex out there, and it’s pretty much the only way to not get a sexually transmitted disease.”

Williams recalled a time when she knew nothing of the virus with which she would later have to live.

“People were dropping dead like flies, and we didn’t know why. It became an epidemic of the time,” Williams said. “It was only then I decided to do my research and soon discovered I got the virus. I had to educate myself on the disease.”

Today, people are more aware of the dangers of contracting the disease, but many still make the same common mistakes of the past.

“I had to change my life,” Williams said. “I quit the drinking and the drugging. People today are still making the same mistakes. They’re getting drunk and high, and they don’t even realize what they’re doing when they do it. You can get AIDS and HIV from a simple one-night stand.”

Williams said after her initial devastation, she decided she had a life to live.

“I told myself if I ever got HIV I would kill myself,” she said.

Her first encounter with an HIV/AIDS-related funeral in 1988, however, changed her mind.

“I remembered that my friend just let himself die. I thought, ‘We don’t have to just die.’ I never understood why he let himself get that way. I chose to live.”

When Williams contracted AIDS, she said, she was told not to have children.

“I was told that I could pass it along to my unborn child, which is very true, but I didn’t, and now here’s Amber, alive and well.”

Williams said there is so much left in her life to see.

“I have milestones in my life I have to see so I’m not just going to die,” she said. “I want to live to see my daughter graduate college. I have another daughter who is 12 years old. I want to live to see her graduate high school.”

Williams said she enjoys educating people about AIDS.

“Basically, I like talking to people. I just wish there was someone to have educated us on the matter,” she said. “Sometimes people don’t want to do anything for themselves, though. We have to go to where they are and pass out the pamphlets, give them the tests with automatic results. The hardest part about my job is telling people that they’re positive.”

Williams’ work hasn’t gone unnoticed.

HBO is making a movie, “Life Support,” about Williams’ life story. The movie will star Queen Latifah and is set for release in March. It focuses on how Williams continues to live with HIV and how she educates the public about the disease.

The United Nations has designated Dec. 1 of every year as World AIDS Day. On that day, people around the world wear red ribbons to spread the message of safe sex and AIDS prevention.

But Williams said one day is not enough.

“People should be doing these things everyday,” she said. “People should practice World AIDS Day everyday, not just on Dec. 1.”