UCLA honors World AIDS Day

Students observed World AIDS Day on Wednesday by educating
themselves about their own bodies and learning about the global
epidemic.

The UCLA AIDS Institute, the world arts and cultures department
and other organizations and student groups organized a series of
workshops and movies, provided areas for HIV testing and held
seminars on sex education, among other topics.

Reporters from the Daily Bruin attended six of these different
sessions in different corners of the campus.

Marching for Change

Hundreds of people marched into Bruin Plaza from several
directions to kick off the main event of the UCLA World AIDS Day:
“I Know ““ and Knowledge is Power.”

Members of the campus community came together and united under a
common goal: to spread awareness about the HIV pandemic and bring
it closer to home for students.

Three marches led scores of students into the plaza at noon,
where they heard speakers discuss why HIV is everyone’s
concern and the reasons why anyone who may have been exposed to HIV
should be tested.

Volunteers from the Student Welfare Commission worked at
informational booths, passing out fliers, stickers, T-shirts and
ribbons about HIV and AIDS as a local band sang tunes about getting
tested for HIV.

Sara Lin, a third-year microbiology student, said she was amazed
by how many people marched and inspired by the level of student
interest.

“It’s nice to see students making an effort to find
out what’s going on in the world, and to see them care about
really important issues,” Lin said. An estimated 40,000
people contract HIV in the United States each year.

Testing

With lines backing up well into Bruin Walk, mobile testing
trucks providing free HIV and STD testing proved to be a success
among the UCLA community.

Edwin Bayrd, the director of the UCLA AIDS Institute who helped
organize the event, said he was absolutely shocked by the number of
people who wanted to be tested and later said some students waited
in line for three hours to find out their status.

“I thought we’d be lucky to have 10 students
volunteer to take (the test),” he said.

From locations like Skid Row near downtown to university
campuses in the L.A. area, the two testing units, Prevention on
Wheels and Minority AIDS project, are part of a Center for Disease
Control and Prevention-sponsored program that offers free testing
to communities of varying risk levels.

Besides having to wait in line for up to several hours, most
students were content with the testing process.

Judith Wenz, a fourth-year psychology student, said she had been
wanting to get tested for a while.

“I’ve really been looking for a place to do this.
It’s awesome,” Wenz said.

While some students were hesitant to get tested, Wenz and other
students were pushing their friends to do it.

“You shouldn’t be afraid to get tested for HIV. It
shouldn’t be like that anymore. It shouldn’t have that
(negative) stigmatism,” said Nicki Shinbori, a UCLA Dance
Marathon committee member.

With only three hours allotted for testing and eight testing
counselors working, an estimated 85 students got tested and
received their results, said Zella Jildon, program manager for
Prevention on Wheels.

Individuals had a choice between a rapid test, in which they
receive results within 20 minutes, or an oral or blood-withdrawal
test, where results must be assessed in a lab.

Kevin Williams, a program manager for Minority AIDS Project,
said that out of the clients he tested, most “had a good
sense” of their risk level.

The UCLA AIDS Institute hopes to have mobile testing units come
to campus every three to four months, said Elizabeth Withers-Ward,
managing director of the UCLA AIDS Institute.

Though at the end of the day, many students did not get a chance
to get tested, organizers emphasized that HIV testing is available
at the Arthur Ashe Student Health and Wellness Center and other
test centers off campus year-round.

Sex-ed theater

It isn’t every day an auditorium full of UCLA students has
a demonstration of how to orally put on a condom. Still less often
will students see that act performed with a yellow- and
orange-striped dildo, followed by an artistic performance from a
completely naked man.

Both the dildo and the naked man were parts of a “Make
Art/Stop AIDS” Performance Showcase, held in the Freud
Playhouse on Wednesday.

The showcase was put on in an effort to show the potential of
art to connect with the public about prevention of AIDS.

Through a sexualized demonstration of putting on a condom, the
story was told of an HIV-positive Ugandan man forced into identity
theft to get the medicine he needed. The nude performance depicted
the death of a completely nude man and touched on a variety of
AIDS-related issues.

Artists with backgrounds hailing from as far away as India and
Uganda demonstrated the use of art as a powerful tool to spread a
necessary message.

An audience of over 250 people, primarily students, watched
monologues, dances and video presentations dealing with different
aspects of AIDS for about two hours. Many of the audience members
wore all black, broken only by the red ribbons and “I
Know” stickers that decorated their chests and backs.

“Artists usually don’t think of themselves as the
people who can save lives,” said David Gere, the moderator of
the showcase and an associate professor in the world arts and
cultures department.

He spoke of the use of art to get out the message about AIDS
prevention as “tackling (AIDS) with pleasure and joy,”
noting that art can get “the message through in a better way
than clinicians can.”

The tendency of people to think of AIDS simply as something to
be fought biologically and a desire to put a human face to the
disease were reasons cited by the artists for the pieces they
performed.

Other forms of art were shown on campus, as several libraries
featured AIDS awareness posters hailing from around the world,
including works from India, China and Germany.

A diverse range of subjects were portrayed in the posters, from
a night scene with a condom moon to stylized superheroes
championing condoms as the ultimate form of protection.

A worldwide epidemic

An African child less than 8 years old lies on a cot, staring
plaintively at the screen as a tear rolls down the side of his
cheek.

The boy ““ one of 1.6 million individuals who is infected
with AIDS in Malawi ““ was shown in “AIDS Treatment:
reaching the people?”, a documentary produced by Doctors
without Borders intended to inform viewers of how many people are
infected worldwide by AIDS and HIV.

The documentary followed the lives of the patients and their
daily struggles in fighting AIDS and gave many staggering
statistics: Every six seconds, someone is infected with AIDS, and
95 percent of those infected live in developing countries like
Malawi and Thailand, where health care provided by the government
is about $4 per person a year.

To help these countries with health care, Doctors without
Borders, an international group of doctors who volunteer in
developing countries, establishes programs to provide treatment for
AIDS patients. But the difficulty with these programs is that once
treatment has started, it must be continued for life or the body
will increase resistance to the drug.

These programs cannot stay in the countries forever, and the
doctors must find ways to hand 1,000 patients over to a government
that cannot afford the treatment.

The screening drew a variety of viewers, many of whom were UCLA
students wearing the black “Knowledge is Power”
T-shirts. Several members of Doctors without Borders were present
at the screening and spoke to the crowd of about 60 after the
film.

Dr. Gildon Beall, a former UCLA professor who opened a clinic in
Nanjing, China, said one solution is to “empower local groups
to political action by lobbying for generic and cheaper
drugs.”

Another member of Doctors without Borders from Kenya, Dr. Farjad
Sarafian, said, “Fighting for those infected to be recognized
is half the battle, and the other half it to fix it.”

AIDS in the media

42 screens and over 84 hours of programming in the Instructional
Media Library made up the AIDS and Moving Image exhibits.

The collection of films, news programs, documentaries and talk
shows selected by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the
media library were selected to provide a diverse chronology of AIDS
in the media and encourage students to do their own research in the
future.

Kim Yutani, the curator for the event, said diversity of
representation was a goal in order to show that AIDS does not only
affect gay, white men, but also Asian American women, among
others.

The exhibit was not only meant to inform people but to interrupt
students’ regular uses of the media library, raising
additional awareness, said project coordinator Mark Quigley.

“There should be a bump in the day for people. Hopefully
this will provide them with some food for thought for the
day,” he said.

Several professors required or recommended that their classes
attend the exhibit, either as part of the course or for extra
credit.

Christie Shaw, a third-year undeclared student whose modern
dance class met at the exhibit instead of its regular classroom,
said it helped her think about issues that she does not usually
consider on a daily basis.

“It’s important to be aware of this mass suffering
that’s going on. It’s a problem people should know
about,” she said.

Courtney Starble, a third-year political science student, said
her communication studies course offered extra credit for visiting
the exhibit. She said she was surprised at how much AIDS awareness
had changed between films from the 1980s and newer films.

“That’s an eye-opener, in terms of how much
it’s changed,” she said.

The Three Amigos and censorship

The Three Amigos, a trio of animated cartoon condoms, had some
simple messages to stop the spread of AIDS.

“You just can’t score without a condom,” the
three friends said while blocking soccer balls from entering a
goal. “No condom, no blastoff,” said the group while
stuck in a grounded rocket ship.

Canadian producer Firdaus Kharas created The Three Amigos as a
tool to globally spread messages about AIDS and sexually
transmitted diseases. The cartoons have been translated into 40
different languages, and the project aims to air the cartoons in
100 countries.

Firdaus showed the cartoons before a panel discussed censorship
of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender prevention messages at
the Freud Playhouse. His success in reaching large audiences with
the cartoon was juxtaposed with panelists describing other
organizations that have had difficulty working around governmental
roadblocks.

Darlene Weide is the former director of the Stop AIDS Project in
San Francisco, a federally funded organization for gay and bisexual
men that she said came under fire when the government questioned
whether some of their workshops were obscene or promoted homosexual
activity.

Under the Helms Amendment, an amendment attached to a federal
spending bill, organizations that receive federal funding have to
fall within certain criteria. Weide said Stop AIDS was eventually
cleared of any violations, but the investigation stifled many of
the organizations’ primary goals because it had to devote
resources to respond to the investigation.

Directors of other AIDS awareness and prevention organizations
also shared stories of difficulty reaching audiences with their
messages.

Compiled from reports by Jen Murphy, Shaudee Navid, Lindsey
Morgan, Nicole Slezak, Lee Bialik and Ari Bloomekatz, Bruin staff.
E-mail reporters at [email protected].