Leaving HIV Stigma Behind at Summer Camp

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/leaving-hiv-stigma-behind-at-summer-camp/374122/

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For most people, the idea of sleepaway camp conjures memories of peeing in the woods, food fights, late-night mischief. But for Maci, the summers she has spent at Camp Sunrise, a summer camp for children and youth impacted by HIV/AIDS, the experience was something more: a break from being different.

“It’s the one week out of the entire year that I feel normal,” said Maci, who began attending the Columbus, Ohio-based camp when she was just six-years-old. “It’s the only place I can just be that person I’d like to be if HIV weren’t in my life.”

Maci was born infected with HIV, having contracted the virus in utero, during birth, or through her mother’s breast milk. Though her prognosis was grim, as was that of most babies born in the early 1990s, the introduction of powerful antiretroviral therapies just years later meant that children like Maci, not expected to make to past kindergarten, had a shot at growing up.

Now 20 years old and a sophomore at Kent State University in Cleveland, Maci is one of thousands of young people who have survived in HIV’s shadow. Physically, she’s endured a childhood punctuated by serious, often deadly, infections and suffered various effects of long-term anti-retroviral use, such as hearing impairment and memory loss. Emotionally, she has grappled with anger toward her mother, who she blamed for infecting her with HIV, and the grief that came when Maci lost her to AIDS.