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 Health & Beauty | September 2006 
From Despair of Sisters, a House of Hope is Built
 Peggy Peattie - Union-Tribune
| | Rosalva Vasquez, the founder of Eunime Por Tijuana, asked José Gabriel Ahumada Ramírez (bottom right) how old he was. He's 4, and Claudia Escobedo (left) is 9. Vasquez wanted to create a homey setting where families could find support. |
Tijuana – It all began with Eunice, a little girl who died of AIDS. And her sister, Noemi, who survives with the disease.
Today, their stories are helping others across the city cope with HIV/AIDS. Eunime Por Tijuana, a program inspired by the sisters and their struggles, offers hope to infected children and their families.
Drop in on a Saturday and it might not seem like much is going on inside this small, white bungalow near the city's downtown bullring. On a sunny afternoon late last month, a handful of children leaned over artwork in the playroom. Across the hallway, their mothers sat around a long conference table, sharing lunch.
Eunime Por Tijuana does everything it can to help, offering support groups, counseling, emergency financial assistance, even clothing. Volunteers run it on a shoestring budget. The aim, said founder Rosalva Vasquez, is to create a homey setting where families can both find and offer comfort.
“A lot of people reject you, sometimes you can't even talk about it,” said Alma Aldana Lara, a small, soft-spoken woman of 42. Thanks to medication, her adopted son, who was born with HIV, is a healthy, rambunctious 4-year-old.
Melani Villanueva, a 30-year-old single mother diagnosed with AIDS, showed a photograph of the baby girl she lost to the disease. Reyna Ahumada, 40, wonders about the future for herself and 4-year-old son, both of whom have AIDS.
“This is where we express ourselves,” said Socorro Escobedo, 40, whose 9-year-old adopted daughter contracted HIV from her birth mother, who has since died.
Everyone in this house has a story to tell. Of watching a sister, a son or parent cope with HIV/AIDS. Of losing loved ones, of learning to live with the diagnosis and handle the side effects of medications that can slow down or block the damaging effects of the virus.
Baja California's Health Department has registered nearly 5,000 AIDS cases since 1983, close to 70 percent of them in Tijuana. Nationally, the city's rate ranks second only to Mexico City – but the reported cases remain below those in San Diego where the county health department through July 31 had registered 12,860 AIDS cases since it began keeping track in November 1981.
South of the border, as the virus has spread, so have efforts to contain AIDS. The Baja California Health Department has stepped up programs aimed at detecting and treating HIV/AIDS, and a half-dozen private groups offer a range of complementary services, including counseling and housing for indigent patients.
“We're helping with testing, with psychological help, with medication,” said Dr. Remedios Lozada, who heads the Baja California Health Department's HIV/AIDS program in Tijuana. “But these are spaces where people can feel comfortable, where they can meet others with a common problem, and can learn how to live with this,“ said Lozada, referring to the work done by nonprofit groups like Eunime.
Most children who contract HIV get the virus from their infected mothers. Such perinatal transmission has fallen dramatically worldwide over the past decade with the introduction of zidovudine, a medication given to women who are pregnant and infected with HIV. San Diego's last such recorded case of mother-to-infant transmission was in April 2005, according to county health department records.
The Baja California Health Department, which is pioneering an HIV prevention program in Mexico, two years ago began testing all pregnant women coming through its health centers and offered follow-up treatment. As a result, perinatal cases have dropped dramatically, but the problem still persists in certain populations, such as mothers addicted to drugs who don't get prenatal treatment, Lozada said.
Diagnosed in 1995, Eunice and Noemi Quezada were two of the first known pediatric HIV/AIDS cases in the city. Their mother died of AIDS. Eunice died before she reached the age of 4.
Her older sister, Noemi, tested positive for HIV when she was 8, and by 14 had developed AIDS after failing to take her medications and fell gravely ill.
“I began to shut down inside myself, I'd begun thinking, 'What's the use?' ” recalled Noemi, who had been told she'd never be able to have a family.
As Noemi's symptoms grew progressively worse, doctors said she wouldn't live. Noemi lingered for months at Tijuana's General Hospital, where the city's poorest and uninsured patients go for treatment. Luckily, she had an older sister, Juana Ortiz, to fight on her behalf, finding the money to buy medicine and demanding that the doctors treat her.
Ortiz found an ally in Vasquez, who was born in Tijuana and is now a family advocate at the Mother Child and Adolescent HIV Program at the University of California San Diego. Touched by the stories of Eunice and Noemi, Vasquez saw the need to reach out to children with HIV/AIDS and their families in her native city.
A year-and-a-half ago, the two women began working in a waiting room at Tijuana's General Hospital, helping families confronting HIV/AIDS to connect with other families in the same situation so they could offer each other support. Last May, they got a place of their own, renting a tiny house with hardwood floors.@Grants from two U.S. groups have been crucial: $7,000 from the Alliance Health Care Foundation and $10,000 from the Children Affected by AIDS. Volunteers on both sides of the border provide much-needed support and donations of everything from clothes to toys to food.
Today, Eunime's primary participants are 32 children undergoing treatment at Tijuana's General Hospital, along with their families.
Six years after she was told there was no hope, Noemi Quezada is 19, bright-eyed and smiling, as she tells of of her dreams of finishing school and getting married.
Noemi hopes her own story will help others in her situation. “I could have learned from others,” she said. “I don't want other children to go through what I had to.” |
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