LIVING
POSITIVE
How reporting on HIV/AIDS opened my eyes
Dr. Thalyta Louw Swanepoel I cannot remember the first story I wrote about HIV and AIDS. But I remember the first event I attended as a young journalist who had just inherited the medical beat at the Afrikaans daily newspaper “Beeld” in Johannesburg in 1988. It was at some medical conference I’ve forgotten the name of, but this was where I met the late Professor Ruben Sher, a Jewish researcher who became the “grandfather of AIDS” in South Africa. Sher never shied away from controversy, and he introduced the media to the language of HIV and AIDS by calling a spade a spade. He was any journalist’s dream: always ready with a “good quote” and never too busy to explain the intricacies of the syndrome. At the beginning, it was all about the journalistic “trophies” — an interview with someone with HIV, or even better, AIDS. First a gay man, then a heterosexual woman. Then someone with an HIV+ child. Asking about the cause of infection was not politically correct. But then again, editors wanted to know because people who contracted the human immunodeficiency virus through a blood transfusion, for example, were “acceptable.” HIV+ gay men, on the other hand, were not as newsworthy. HIV became the root of many a tasteless joke. And the cause of unprecedented stereotyping, stigmatization and discrimination — the flip side of the Golden Rule. I ran many beats at my newspaper and was
passionate about most of them. But none was as satisfying for me as covering health, specifically HIV/AIDS. I enjoyed the challenge of “translating” scientific information for laymen, the exhilaration of attending huge international conferences where ground-breaking research results were revealed. And no beat was as gut-wrenching, either. I will never forget the morning I spent at an AIDS clinic in Soweto, listening to HIV+ pregnant women discussing their fears and dreams. I was so used to the negative shroud covering HIV/AIDS that it hardly occurred to me that dreams could be possible. Despite AIDS fatigue among editors, pressure to focus on the political angle of the epidemic and no interest in stories about how to live productively with HIV/AIDS, I wanted to write about positive living. After all, during the 1990s it became evident that HIV/AIDS would become a chronic, manageable disease. In 2002, I had the privilege of interviewing internationally acclaimed photographer Gideon Mendel about his book and exhibition, “A Broken Landscape: HIV & AIDS in Africa.” Amidst the images of pain and hardship were many that depicted joy, compassion and tenderness. These are the ones I remember. One man who has made a particularly lasting impression on me is David Ross Patient, who has been living with HIV for 30 years. As a so-called WWW.OLIVET.EDU
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