Our Power of You

Subic. It’s December 2, the crack of dawn right now. We travelled three hours by bus from Manila Monday night to be here in time for yesterday, the first day of an HIV Awareness campaign training thing for school officials and student leaders, organized by the Department of Education with the support of UNICEF. E is sound asleep in the bed next to mine, while I’m sitting up in bed right now... blogging. Freaky, huh? Yes, E, gising na si lola. Hahaha.

Yesterday was just the first of three days, but it was so overwhelming... so much so that I was too speechless to blog last night, but at this break of dawn everything’s coming back to me and I don’t even know where to start telling you about it.

Basically this all started way back in April when they aired the interview I granted to GMA’s World View on HIV. Yep, the one where some of you watched the back of my head talking. Mr. DepEd just happened to be watching, and contacted my through the blog after that. Little did he know that he’d be having a project like this dealing with HIV.

The DepEd and UNICEF came up with Power Of You, a youth-targeted interactive video about HIV and STIs. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure thing, where users are immersed in the lives of fellow youths and asked to make choices in life surrounding the risk of HIV. And they gathered school officials and student leaders from Luzon here in Subic this week to train them in the usage of the video and how to get the messages across to other kids. Enter E and I.

Mainly, our role was to be resource persons for the sensitization and testimonial part of the program. We were to give a tangible face to HIV. And knowing what kind of a face needed to be given to HIV, we were up to the challenge.

Okay fine, we were up to the challenge until just before our part. But after a morning filled with the prospect of a hundred unfamiliar faces staring at me and judging me, not knowing how things will turn out, my innate stage fright kicking in, and one hell of a biblical debate that crucified us sinners which left E brimming with feist... well, needless to say, I was shaking in my boots and preparing to sweat bullets.

Kuya DepEd Introduced E and I, and actually prematurely gave away that we were indeed HIV positive. I had had it worked into my presentation to give as much shock value as possible, but hell, it’d be too late to back down now.

Basically, E and I were on the opposite ends of the spectrum. He was pasaway boy, who lived a pasaway life that led to HIV. I was geeky boy who lived an almost ideal life that still led to HIV. So we were opposite ends of the spectrum that met in the middle. Point be told, HIV is everyone’s concern.

I breezed through my life story unexpectedly easily actually. I’m the type of person who is terrified to stand before a crowd, but once I get going, I take on a whole new tougher me. I was lucky to have gotten to that phase. I stood there proudly sharing my wares of where I studied and what I accomplished, but hopefully showed how I humbly accepted and coped with being HIV positive.

E followed with his life story. And though his life story involved such shocking times as smoking at age 10, drugs and prostitution, he just had to flash his pearly whites – his teeth, not his briefs – to win the crowd over.

Really, I think the biggest shocker for the audience was that for most of them, they would not have fathomed ever meeting anyone who had HIV in person, let alone two in a day, or in their lifetimes. And with an open forum to follow, we were prepared – or more like we needed to be prepared – to handle these curious young ones and young once.

The questions thrown to us were a spectrum in themselves, from everything from treatment, discrimination, life changes to love lives and sex lives. As usual, I think we painted the kind of HIV positive picture we wanted... a positive one. The liberty at which the students and even the school officials expressed how they “commended”, “congratulated”, “admired” and were “inspired by” us was every bit of flattering, touching and overwhelming. If I’m not mistaken, someone actually shed a tear listening to our unexpectedly happy stories.

People came up to us after to shake our hands, ask for contact details, and even have pictures taken with us... I know, right?! Good luck to us with how far those pictures will go, hahaha. I mean we weren’t celebrities or anything. But neither was this the venue to show how paranoid someone with HIV could be. We were here to empower the positives and enlighten the negatives. Roar!

But it was still just all so overwhelming. This is technically my first major “coming out” experience to date, and believe me, I was prepared for the worst. I was surprised some biblical lady didn’t take a stone from her bag to have a swing at us with. So as a first, this was the best it could ever get. And I’m surprised to hear myself saying... coming out ain’t so bad after all.

So is the title “Back In The Closet” nearing the end of its useful life? Well not quite. Not until I muster up the guts to tell my family. But this is a good step forward, right?

So on behalf of E, I thank the participants for opening their ears and minds to our stories. We hope we got our message across. Yep, even we have and need our “Power Of You”. To the guys and gals of DepEd and UNICEF, thank you, thank you, thank you for this opportunity... and see you again later for more. Hehehe.