When you meet someone who touches every life they come in contact with, whose zeal for life spreads like wildfire, who cannot help but bring a smile to your face and laughter to your belly, you count yourself as being blessed. If you meet a dozen of those people you are witnessing something special. If those people are under the age of 20, you are witnessing a miracle. I am one of those blessed people who saw a miracle.
Over Halloween weekend 2004, I was honored to spend the weekend with about a hundred people who come together at a campsite in Avon Park, Florida to celebrate life, temporarily forgetting that HIV and AIDS have ravaged their lives. The thirteen year old girl who has lost both parents to AIDS cheering on the sixteen year old, born infected, in a kayak race. The seven year old, also born infected, carrying the 18 month old to her mother, who is so grateful to have a weekend away from round the clock care of her four infected children. The group of five high school sophomores who attend to support their friend, also born infected. The incredible 17 year old concert violinist, who last year decided to stop taking her 20 pills a day and was confronted by her loving peers and convinced her that her life was worth living, who played Carnegie Hall a few months later. When she played an excerpt from the piece she composed, a work that chronicled her life as a teenager born with HIV, I could not hold back the tears.
Another true joy I was able to experience was the importance of my future role as a health care worker. Though barely crawling in my infancy of medical education, I was able to learn the importance of touch in the healing process. I learned how a parent feels when the doctor immediately puts on a pair of latex gloves for an external physical exam on their infected child, and how a child feels when the doctor winces at the first site of blood.
What I truly learned from this weekend was very simple. A person does not need to be infected to be affected. When I sat and talked with the homeless man, who five days ago was still physically addicted to heroin and who four days prior found out he was HIV positive, how could I not be affected and still claim humanity? The founder of the Friends Together network, Cathy Robinson, who puts this camp together, who has had a zero T-cell count for the past six months, likes to say once you volunteer you can never leave the family. I think she may have hooked another one.