In observance of the National Asian and Pacific Islander HIV/AIDS Awareness Day,

In observance of the National Asian and Pacific Islander HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, and through our program Uniting America- a project of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, we put together an HIV Health Awareness Fair at the Vietnamese Association of Illinois on May 18th. The aim of the health fair was to not only provide HIV education and testing to the Asian community of Uptown Chicago, but also to bring together the different community organizations working around HIV and start a critical dialogue.

Because my specific program role as a Uniting America Fellow is to build bridges between the LGBTQ community and the immigrant communities of Illinois, I tried to find a common struggle that is an issue to everyone involved. While HIV is a familiar issue in the LGBTQ communities and they have been dealing with it since the early 1980s, that is certainly not the case in the Asian communities, where HIV is still a highly stigmatized phenomenon and the need to provide education, testing and prevention is of the highest priorities. Since May 19th is the National Asian and Pacific Islander HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, I thought this was a perfect opportunity to address this struggle, bring these different communities together through the commonality between them, and to build bridges that solve problems.

The HIV Health Fair we held was certainly a safe place for the different participating organizations to discuss their work around HIV and to address what could be done in the future around the epidemic in the Asian communities, keeping in mind all the cultural restraints and language barriers we are faced with. The questions we tried to address included the following: What can we do to reach out to the Asian community as a collaborative, to make HIV less stigmatized? What can we do to get people tested and educated? How can we reach out to our Asian youth? In what capacity can the different organizations work together to build bridges between them? Etc.

There were four primary aspects discussed in the health fair. The first was the legal aspect and how it pertains to HIV. Since Lambda Legal, my host organization, is a legal group that fights for full equality for LGBT individuals and people living with HIV, It made sense to ask our attorney HIV Project Director Scott Schoettes to discuss what is going on around HIV and the law, discrimination in public policy, insurance, employment, etc. Scott, who is openly HIV positive himself, did an amazing job covering the work he has been involved in. I want to especially thank him for attending regardless of the fact that he had that day off and it was his birthday. For a lot of people, the issues Scott had mentioned were the highlight of the event.

The second aspect was traditional medicine. We had a few organizations represented in this area. For example, The Howard Brown Health Center and Asian Human Services talked about their work, brought with them educational materials and had a room to do HIV testing at the Health Fair. These are examples of the community organizations that do direct HIV services in the field and are equipped to handle most HIV medical needs.

The third aspect of the Health fair was the spiritual aspect (complimentary Alternative Medicine) such as yoga and faith. For a lot of people, incorporating nontraditional medicine in the fight against HIV is one of the essential steps in the healing process. This was especially important since complimentary alternative medicine is embedded within the Asian culture and tradition. For this, Per Erez , now the director of First Person Healing Arts, a private yoga therapy studio here in chicago has written us a letter about the importance of nontraditional medicine on HIV health. Per’s teaching background is rich with diversity, including work in traditional yoga centers, corporations, health clubs, hospitals and social service agencies throughout Chicago. In addition to over 2000 hours of study in Yoga and the therapeutic application of its techniques, Per’s work has been documented locally on the WGN Chicago channel 9 News as well as the Oprah show. We read what Mr. Erez had sent us and were very gracious that he took the time to participate.

The fourth aspect of the HIV Health Fair was about what the rest of community does when it comes to services and outreach. AIDS Legal Council of Chicago, Asian Health Coalition, Center on Halsted, Invisible 2 Invincible, AIDS Foundation of Chicago, Social Security Administration, and others spoke about their work and the need to reach out to the Asian Communities.

But probably the most powerful component of the Health Fair was a personal narrative by an HIV positive Filipino American who put a face to the struggle. Our speaker, who wished to remain anonymous, stood up there and shared with the crowd his status as HIV-positive, gay, Catholic, and in recovery for crystal meth abuse and how that affected him as an Asian American– “So I have all these elements that are so against my family’s tradition.” “I guess what I’m trying to do is ‘normalize’ HIV and not talk about it in such a way that there’s this ‘otherness,'” he said. “We need to be less silent.”

We concluded the event by a commitment from all the community organizations present to start a google group to address the stigma and obstacles around HIV in the Asian community. That was the exact reason for doing such an event in the first place. It is also the premise of Uniting America; we build bridges to solve problems and this is only an example of that. The aim should be to foster our individual work by strengthening it with the work of others and filling the gaps. None of us can do the work on their own.

Other organizations I did not specifically mention played a major role in the event and it could not have been possible without them. That includes Equality Illinois, Northside Community Resources, Uptown Chamber of Commerce, and others. But most importantly, I want to thank the Vietnamese Association of Illinois, our event host, for being so accommodating and kind.

Our event was one of only 25 events or so in the country around the National Asian and Pacific Islander HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. The event received some local and national coverage. The Windy City Times of Chicago wrote an amazing article about the event, which was also adapted and covered by US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is a part of the publication CDC HIV/Hepatitis/STD/TB Prevention News Update. Other organizations/sites covered the event including The Body, an organization based in New York and The Banyan Tree Project in California.

http://icirr.org/content/asian-american-hiv-health-fair