Out In The Mountains : News - C2EA Coming to St. Mike's

C2EA Coming to St. Mike's

       Colchester — C2EA, the Campaign to End AIDS, is the focus of an intense group of young women who are students at St. Michael's College in Colchester. It's a national campaign that kicked off in Washington DC with a march last May by 3500 HIV/AIDS activists to the gates of the White House to place 8500 pairs of shoes representing the daily global death toll from the disease.
      It continues this fall with a bus tour/caravan – or more precisely, nine of them, one of which begins at the college – to bring diverse voices to the capital with four demands:
* fully fund quality treatment and support services for all people living with HIV everywhere in the world;
* ramp up HIV prevention at home and abroad, guided by science rather than ideology;
* increase research to find a cure, more effective treatments and better prevention tools;
* fight AIDS stigma and protect the civil rights of all people with HIV and AIDS everywhere.
       As currently planned, the caravan begins on September 30 at the end of a week of on- and off-campus AIDS awareness events and will wend its way across Vermont on Route 15 through Johnson, with a planned stop there, to Hardwick before dropping down Route 14 to Montpelier for an afternoon rally and news conference. Another stop is planned for the White River junction area, in collaboration with ACoRN. The caravan is due in Manchester, New Hampshire on Saturday.
      According to Mike Bosia, a St. Mike's professor helping to coordinate the planning group, the object of the Montpelier stop is to push Republican Governor Jim Douglas to urge other Republicans to "move" on the Ryan White Care Act funding. The idea of buses, Bosia says, is to reconnect activists who work on policy with local grassroots supporters, service-providers, and people with AIDS — those who live and work everyday with the consequences of the policy decision made elsewhere.
       The Campaign to End AIDS, or at least the Vermont part of it, he adds, "is more of a process than a conclusion." It encompasses the recognition that HIV/AIDS agencies are "underfunded, understaffed, and overburdened."
       Vermont CARES Director Peter Jacobs warns that "Ryan White [Act] cuts are coming in 2006. There will be no funds for case management or patient transport." There might be more funding for drug assistance (ADAP programs), but the funding will be even more tightly controlled by the federal government.
      Erin McDonell is the most involved of the St. Mike's students – and she has brought along other young women, too. She identifies as straight, when pushed, and says she's not involved because a family member or close friend has HIV or AIDS. Her mentor is Patricia Siplon, a professor from whom she took a class on the global AIDS pandemic. One requirement for the class is public service. But McDonell is clearly not just fulfilling a requirement.
      Few of the students involved at St. Mike's "have a personal relationship to the epidemic," Bosia points out, "but they can see the injustice" of how governments and corporations treat those who have the disease.
      The week begins with the Vermont CARES AIDS Walk on Saturday, September 24 at 11 am at Burlington's City Hall.