Skip to main content

HIV/AIDS

City of Dust, City of Stones

Photographer Andre Lambertson and I visited Haiti together four times during 2010. We spent a week there on each occasion. We were there to learn and tell the story of HIV/AIDS in Haiti after the earthquake. Three hundred thousand Haitians died during that quake. Three hundred thousand. There are still bodies in the rubble. They may never be recovered. But millions now live with the memory of their loss. Among that number are the special people who we came to know—the people who are living with HIV/AIDS.

 

Annesha Taylor’s daughter prays at an altar constructed in their backyard in Arnett Gardens in Kingston.

Learning to Speak: The New Age of HIV/AIDS in the Other Jamaica

When I first see Sherene, I can’t help wondering why a teenaged girl is hanging around the clinic on a Saturday afternoon. She is slim, compact, and wears an extremely short denim skirt and a red wool halter-top but seems youthfully uncertain about her body. Her dark shoulders gleam with a hint of sweat from walking to the clinic, though her light makeup is still intact. When she speaks, she announces that she has been in the support group for five years and that she had been living with the virus for six. She tells the story of her three children—the eldest, now eleven, living with her father in Kingston—and the struggle to raise and feed the other two. I’ve misjudged her age completely.