It’s raining prevention: More than 400 people demonstrate for World AIDS Day

Samantha Foster
Staff Writer

With a rush of silence, 400 bright red umbrellas burst open to commence AIDS Awareness Month this past Thursday at Brown’s Island.

RVA Remembers and the Fan Free Clinic came together for their first-ever Richmond public art installation on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day.

This year’s World AIDS Day marked the 30-year anniversary of the first AIDS diagnosis.

“Thirty years is too long,” Executive Director of the Fan Free Clinic, Karen Legato, said in a speech.

For a silent nine and a half minutes, 400 sponsors and volunteers stood in the shape of the famous AIDS ribbon holding red umbrellas. Every nine and a half minutes, someone in America learns that they are infected with HIV.

Senior chemistry major Ibrahim Ahmad volunteered for RVA Remembers through Project Reach, a peer health-education group at VCU.

“I got an email from Project Reach saying that they needed volunteers, and I thought that it would be awesome,” he said. “I want to eradicate AIDS with my umbrella. I want to smite AIDS into the depths of hell.”

Post-bachelor, pre-health graduate student Kate Thompson joined to cause to help raise awareness for AIDS in America.

“I think that people don’t know how many people are affected,” she said.

In 2009, an estimated 42,959 people were diagnosed with HIV and 34,993 people were diagnosed with AIDS in America.

Sarah Kye Price, an associate Professor in the School of Social Work, came to the installation because she supports the Fan Free Clinic.

“(I) lost many, many, many friends to AIDS,” she added, “and World AIDS Day is something I always commemorate.”

Price lost a brother-in-law, Laird Petersen, to AIDS. Petersen was the director of case management at the Fan Free Clinic and was involved in very early AIDS awareness movements in Chicago.

Petersen’s niece and Price’s daughter, 8-year-old Cassie Price, was the youngest umbrella holder present at the event.

Participants in RVA Remembers were passionate about this cause and determined to make a change. At the opening ceremony, Legato said, “Let us mourn those we lost and celebrate those who are surviving … and let us continue to count this disease down to zero.”

Photos by Amber-Lynn Taber