HIV in the Far North
When Karen Soto, a Yupik from western Alaska, was diagnosed with HIV several years ago at a public health clinic in New York City, the woman sitting behind the desk neither acknowledged her name nor offered her a chair. She simply said, "You have HIV, and you have less than a year to live."
"I was extremely angry," Soto says. "I thought, You don't even know me, you don't know what I'm capable of." She became an HIV outreach worker at the American Indian Community House in New York. Last year she returned to Bethel, the Alaskan village where her family lives. There she lectures on HIV.
"There are so few Eskimos living with the virus and willing to talk about it," she says. "So if I'm asked by the Tundra Women's Center, by the schools, to speak about HIV, I always say yes."
When she first told her family of her infection, they didn't seem to react. "I began to wonder if they even understood the implications of HIV," she says. "But I've since realized that they know the implications full well; AIDS just doesn't carry a stigma for them. People here aren't afraid to touch each other, to be close. The only people in my community who haven't been accepting have been non-natives.
"Now I call my HIV disease my ugly child," Soto adds. "This child has chosen me. I can't give it away; it will always be with me. Ultimately this child has given me some of the best gifts of my life. I've come to love my ugly child. Just being challenged by HIV, I've done things I never thought I could do."
--Paula Brewer is the editor of the Harvard AIDS Review.
  
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