Meet Anna

Honduran, full bodied woman with a gorgeous face. She has 5 kids and crochets for a living. But she came to our training classes this week to share about something else. Anna is HIV+ The following is some of the things she shared with us Peace Corps trainees as part of our HIV/AIDs training:

She didn’t want HIV, she didn’t go looking for it, but still it came and found her. Her second husband gave it to her. He knew he was positive. She didn’t. And she didn’t figure it out till she was pregnant with their son Miguel and started to have complications and lose a lot of weight. The hospital staff avoided telling her that she and her newborn son where positive. She received 18 different diagnoses, neglect from the staff, and the first of a lot of stigmatism from being positive. Anna lost most of her friends and had to move after being ostracized from her community. She had to get organized with others and put on a fight with the government to work to make her antiretroviral medication available to her. On top of the discrimination, she has had to deal with being in a 3 month long coma, uterine cancer/chemotherapy, and alcoholism but recovered from it all. I cannot contemplate having to deal with this in the states or even began to imagine what it is like in the second poorest country on the western hemisphere with so much poverty, stigmatism, lack of medical expertise, or resources etc. But after 9 years of being HIV+, she is still in love with life and is a huge source of strength and inspiration to her children including her youngest Miguel. One of her children is in medical school now just hoping he will be able to find a cure for HIV for his mom before its too late.

What hit me in her talk was after telling her story she warned us, “Be very careful with your sympathy.” Being in her position, with so much of a daily struggle, it must be very easy to take hand outs from sympathetic people. But in her case, she refuses. Instead she tells us that when we encounter people in difficult or next to impossible circumstances to offer a shoulder to cry on, a hug, or comforting hand. But then to fervently tell the person, “Te puede, te vale, te sale” (You can, You value, You do it). Sympathy is not about pity for someone's weaknesses but concern for their strengths and aspirations. True sympathy is about empowering others to make the necessary changes in their life and community to find happiness. A free hand out will not give them that depth of fulfillment. This is what Anna has dedicated her life to. I only hope to have a fraction of her strength to do the same.

Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.
Martin Luther King Jr.