Peace Corps Takes on HIV

What might have been little more than dreaming by two new friends at the National Peace Corps Association Conference in St. Paul a year ago, has evolved into an exciting and critically important initiative now in high gear under the direct leadership of Peace Corps Director Mark Schneider. The dream was to involve the Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual affiliate of the NPCA in financially assisting Peace Corps Volunteers in their HIV/AIDS prevention and support efforts. To give the idea legs, the LGB RPCV group contributed more than $2,000 to launch the HIV/AIDS Education and Prevention Fund within Peace Corps’ Partnership Program.

While this was not a great deal of money in the context of the overwhelming devastation occurring in Africa, it nevertheless became an important block on which Peace Corps’ newly announced HIV/AIDS initiative was built. It was this leadership by the LGB RPCV group that initially caught the Director’s attention. The rest of the foundation was quickly put in place after Director Schneider returned from his trip to Africa earlier this year. The unimaginable human tragedy he witnessed convinced him that the Peace Corps could, indeed, must do more to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Many volunteers were already incorporating HIV/AIDS prevention and support into their primary projects or initiating them as secondary activities, but more in the way of specific HIV/AIDS programming needs to be done.

That has all changed now. More than 2,400 volunteers on the continent of Africa will soon be trained in HIV/AIDS prevention and support. The training will provide them with the necessary tools to return to their communities to incorporate these new skills into their primary and secondary activities. New HIV/AIDS projects will be established, up to 200 Crisis Corps Volunteers will be sent to Africa to establish and work in HIV programs, and all new Volunteers assigned to Africa will be involved in HIV activities as either primary or secondary projects.

The first Crisis Corps Volunteers have already been sent to their posts and the remainder will be recruited and sent over the next year. Anyone interested in becoming an HIV/AIDS Crisis Corps Volunteer is encouraged to call (800) 424-8580 x2250. As they say, operators are standing by! This is a great opportunity to become personally involved or re-involved in the battle against AIDS in places where the help is urgently needed.

To kick-start the effort, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded the Peace Corps $500,000 and the Packard Foundation has indicated that it will soon approve a significant grant to train host country nationals in HIV/AIDS prevention. And while more money is expected to flow into this important effort, the task ahead is overwhelming and much more help is needed, not just for Africa, but for many other parts of the world as well. This private sector help is so important because Peace Corps is not permitted to use its congressional appropriation to fund many of these activities.

Having just recently returned from the International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, it was hard not to be struck with the sheer magnitude of the problem. It was everywhere. Indeed, South Africa is home to nearly ten percent of the world’s HIV positive people. The reality that 13 million Africans had already succumbed and that 24 million more were infected hung like a dark cloud over the entire conference. But in spite of this, there was also an inspiring optimism - the world’s attention was finally focused on Africa and the rapidly growing pandemic. And similar to our experience fighting the disease in the US, heartwarming stories of courage, caring and compassion are everywhere. And those remarkable grassroots AIDS service organizations that many of us know all too well are springing up almost daily.

A good deal of this optimism was caused by the substantial presence of Peace Corps at the conference. Nearly thirty staff and volunteers participated. Director Schneider and I were in search of partners who could support our huge HIV/AIDS initiative. This initiative will require producing several different types of training materials in many local languages, and training local people as trainers who can carry the word to their local communities. For these and other crucial activities, securing substantial outside resources is vital to the success of the initiative. Just getting people together in centralized locations for training will be a massive and expensive undertaking.

Africa Regional Director Earl Yates and HIV/AIDS specialist Ruth Mota handled much of the coordination and hands-on leadership at the conference. The largest number of Peace Corps participants were country staff, mostly country directors and health program APCDs in search of the latest ideas and best practices in HIV/AIDS prevention and education. They came from as far away as Ecuador and Moldova. But the most inspiring were the volunteers, two of whom had written papers on their HIV work at their projects had the opportunity to present them at the conference. Their commitment, knowledge, creativity and energy were truly amazing.

Those of us who have either lived with, and/or in the struggle against AIDS since the beginning, know how desperately this effort is needed. And as has been the case from the very beginning of the epidemic, gay people have consistently been at the forefront of the battle - caring for our friends and loved ones who got sick, and creating, leading and funding a whole host of organizations dedicated to fighting the disease. So the leadership and generosity shown by LGB RPCVs in establishing the HIV/AIDS Education and Prevention Fund is typical of what we have learned to expect from our community and totally in the tradition of the volunteer experience.

As the Peace Corps rapidly approaches its 40th birthday, it is hard to imagine a more fitting way for the occasion to be marked than by taking on this great challenge. Nothing Peace Corps does could be more important or more timely than to do all it possibly can to prevent the spread of AIDS, to assist those who are sick and to provide critical support to their families.

Vic Basile was Peace Corps’ Director of the Office of Private Sector Cooperation and International Volunteerism. He was a VISTA volunteer in 1966-67.