The full sting of her condition became clear in the way her friends and neighbors avoided her on the streets of her working-class Kingston neighborhood. "Chloe" is a twenty-seven year old mother of two who contracted HIV from her estranged husband, who himself is now ill due to the complications of AIDS. The children, both school-age are in good health but still endure the leaden stigma attached to AIDS in the form of taunts and exclusion.

Like leprosy or the bubonic plague of centuries past, the burdensome indignity of social alienation is sometimes as difficult to bear as the ravages of the disease itself. The idea of being shunned is a powerful social tool to seeing that AIDS remains out of sight and mind for Jamaicans, as the epidemic infects more daily. As in many cultures throughout the world, sexual activity is considered at once something natural and taboo in the same breath. Also throw into the mix the fact that in Jamaica AIDS is looked upon as a "gay" disease, and the volatile notion of "straight" AIDS cases, or their probability , is somehow a fact that gets no real credence. The social folkways of Jamaica, like those in many other places, have no real provisions for dealing with the "natural" act of human sexuality as a correlative to incurable disease.

With three times the rate of United States AIDS cases, today the Center for Disease Control estimates over 1.5 percent of the adult population of Jamaica is living with HIV or AIDS. With a learned ignorance superimposed over an epidemic illness, homophobia, a thing always just beneath the surface where it comes to AIDS, is becoming a new social norm. As in any chosen ignorance, folk tales and urban myths spring up to take the place of facts. Some of these include claims of folk cures which assault the curability of AIDS, and perpetuates the irresponsible behavior which keeps it spreading. As a treatable disease, the head-in-the-sand approach has only kept the AIDS rate ballooning further.
For the "Chloes" of Jamaica, the future is hardly sunny; drugs and medical care are primitive and strained, with the cost of anti-retroviral drugs being prohibitive or unavailable. A small stipend monthly is what keeps this friend of a friend functioning, and for the time being, healthy.
Where it comes to facing the horrible specter of AIDS, Jamaicans need to change with the times or die with them.

Learn more about this author, J Larkin.
Click here to send author comments or questions.

---

Add your voice

Know something about How does stigma and discrimination, as witnessed in Jamaica, perpetuate the global HIV/AIDS epidemic??
We want to hear your view. Write now!