Kwame Dawes [m], poet/writer

This is home for me. Jamaica is home for me. I grew up in Jamaica. My family is still in Jamaica.

I'm here working on an article on HIV/AIDS in Jamaica.

HIV/AIDS has had this weird kind of place in the imagination. Both one of horror,

a sense that this becomes a kind of irrevocable sentence to you

and yet, one of hope where we get instances of people who

manage to live with this disease and so on.

Annesha Taylor [f]

Well this is my community...

This is where I did all the playing and growing up and all of that.

When I was eleven I left here, and went to West Africa to live

and I came back here now in this community

where I live with my mother, my uncle.

I have a lot of family members and a lot of friends around my community.

[Kwame] I knew something of Annesha's story before I met Annesha.

And what I knew of her story was that she was the poster-child

for HIV/AIDS in Jamaica and for surviving, for living with HIV/AIDS in Jamaica.

Well that puzzled me and it made me think what would

make a girl, a woman, in Jamaica in 2007

take the chance of going up front and admitting to the whole world that she's HIV positive?

I knew initially that there must have been an element of bravery there.

[Annesha] Stigma in Jamaica is a very big thing.

It makes you feel bad. It makes you not want to come out.

It makes, it makes you want to kill yourself more faster.

Annesha you are beautiful. God Bless you always.

Mrs. J Redwood from Vere Technical

It's a high school I went to present

and they gave me this as a token.

Being a poster child everybody is looking up to you.

Everybody is going to look at the life that you live.

If you are going to practice what you preach.

[Kwame] One of the interesting things about Annesha's story is that when I first interviewed Annesha,

she seemed concerned about her job, but not overtly so, she didn't say anything about it.

about her life, particularly with regards to this project that in fact that Annesha had to step down from the position of being this media

figure because she had gotten pregnant while she was going around doing work in terms of talking about abstinence and so on.

[Annesha] And sometimes I just sit down and I cry.

Because I know

What they are expecting of me, I have to live up, I have to live up to it.

Yesterday when I was sitting at home, I said...

Is this mistake I made in like...is part of it that shattered my career?

If you would call it a career. Is it what shattered my child's bread?

And I just cry. And I say well...

If they call me to do any workshop, I will go.

But I will tell them they have to pay me.

I'm not going to do anything free for them.

I just sit here wondering if they are going to call me to do any work.

Or if they are going to call me back and say, here it is, a contract.

two months later...

[Kwame] So Annesha the last time we talked you weren't even sure whether you'd still be working here at the clinic, right?

[Annesha] Yeah.

So tell me how that worked out.

[Annesha] I got back my contract. I signed back my contract.

I'm a community peer educator

And we talk about STIs...sexually transmitted infections.

Also HIV, and we show them how to put on a condom.

I will talk about myself to get more of a response from them.

living in serving people, helping people, working with people, educating people and building a life around that task.

And maybe, that's the point.

Maybe the point is that part of any work against HIV/AIDS in a society will have to take in the role that it's going to play in

making those people who are living with the disease able to function and able to look after their family, and able to find the money to buy

food so that they can take the medication and so on. So in a sense, Annesha's story may be the story of many of the people who live with

the disease but it may also be a lesson to Jamaican society about how it's going to have

[Annesha] Just let us come together and fight stigma.

HIV is not a death sentence, you can live many many years.

And also love persons who are HIV positive.

Special Correspondent — Kwame Dawes, Co-Producers — Nathalie Applewhite and Stephen Sapienza

Videographers — Nathalie Applewhite, Doug Gritzmacher and Stephen Sapienza

Production Assistants — Janeen Heath, Chris Thompson, Glendon Asphal and Darren Scott

Produced by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. As featured on "Foreign Exchange," an Azimuth Media Production

An extended essay by Kwame Dawes on HIV/AIDS in Jamaica can be found in the Spring 2008 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review

at www.vqronline.com

Related video, photographs, poetry and music can be found on www.livehopelove.com