Aid for AIDS Interview

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Every day you and I get bombarded with negative news. And just like our bodies, become what we eat, our minds become the information that we consume. If you want to stay positive, it’s so important that you also listen to stories that inspire you and uplift you. In this podcast we interview leading experts dedicated to solving the world’s most pressing problems. And if you stick around, I promise you will not only be as informed as if you watched the news, you will be uplifted, inspired, and have more positive energy in your life. Welcome to Great.com Talks With.

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Hi and welcome today, great dotcom talks with the crisis, I guess I hope I pronounce that right. Who is the executive director of AIDS Aid for AIDS, which is a New York based non-profit organization committed to empowering communities that are at the risks of HIV. And if you haven’t done so already, you definitely want to press subscribe in your podcast app or on YouTube, because today we’re exploring what we can do to prevent AIDS and make life better. For those who have already contracted, it has us. Thank you so much for speaking with grea.com talks with.

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Thank you. Thank you. I’m so excited.

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Beautiful. So I did a short introduction, but how would you describe it for AIDS for someone that is not familiar with what you do?

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Well, eight for eight. We have had our mantra that we save lives one by one since 1996, since we found that eight for eight in New York City. First, we understood that people with HIV needed medicine, and we started with collecting a surplus of HIV medicine and we started sending it to people in developing countries. And what we call now low income and middle income countries but soon after we realized that somebody with HIV needed. Needed a more comprehensive view of it, of their life. They needed help, they needed to believe in themselves, they needed education, they needed to know how to prevent it, how to live well with it and how to, in many cases, fight for others. And that’s what we did. So besides providing HIV medicine that we became the largest HIV medicine distribution program in the world, we have supported over twenty thousand people in sixty nine countries worldwide. And we also develop a lot of leaders who supported AIDS activists in Latin America, in the Middle East and those that were staying alive to keep somebody else alive. And that’s what we believe. So we do save lives one by one.

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Wow, that’s a super cool mission, and it makes me curious, because you are the founder of the organization. What inspired you to start taking action in this way? How did you come across study groups here? Is this medicine that is not being used well that can be utilized by people in lower income countries?

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Well, I think for me, what’s clear, I was working at the time in an HIV clinic at former St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village in New York, and I’m originally from Venezuela and AIDS was devastating the world.

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And ninety six, when it’s the family of HIV medicine is called protease inhibitors. When these medicines came out, they made what for years, they called it a cocktail and really change his story.

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That is why we can say today that HIV is a chronic disease, if somebody has access to HIV, they can have a day life expectancy just like anyone without any health condition. So that was the beginning of it.

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And I saw it and I saw how people were switching because two treatments came out at the same time in six two protease inhibitors, which is this family of HIV meds that came out right after the other. So people who have the cocktail with the queen over? They wanted the one with Novia and back and forth, and there was a lot of supplies.

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I looked at it and I said, look, if this is happening at St. Vincent HIV Clinic, it’s happening nationwide. So we just act on it. I was previously and these activities that will spiral out of New York, coming from Venezuela, seeing the need on. Yes. For me, it was the thing to do, not understanding that the magnitude of what we were creating is just when you act like an act of kindness to humanity and this is the calling, we all we all have to power for an act of kindness to others with without thinking how much is going to impact its impact.

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I really enjoy hearing you describe acting on kindness in that way and not complicating things and going with that instinct. Now I’m curious, how is it for someone that is not so? Informed about the status of HIV, how has things progressed in the last 10 years and where are we going with it with HIV as a whole?

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Well, we go in on the gold, the UN aids gold.

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It’s to end AIDS by 2030, and a lot of people would say, well, there’s no cure, there’s no vaccine yet, there’s some studies, but there’s no vaccine. But what we have now will stop the spread of HIV if everybody follows what to do.

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For instance, if today everyone who has been in contact with somebody with HIV and feels that they are positive, it’s not their HIV status they can get. Medical care, they can get treatment once they take the treatment. That medicine would control the HIV in their bloodstream and make it undetectable. That’s actually a test. A blood test is called the HIV viral load test. So once you are undetectable, you don’t transmit the virus.

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So that’s huge. That’s huge. So being HIV positive now on the treatment undetectable means two things.

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Once you’re healthy, you eat well, exercise, meditate, take care of your spirit, take care of your mind. Take care of your body.

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That would allow you take care of your earth, your environment, but also you don’t pass on HIV, so somebody with HIV right now undetectable can have sex without them. Be careful with what I’m saying. I’m not telling people with that to have sex without a condom. That’s a personal responsibility. But you don’t pass on HIV as a woman 100 percent.

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Now it’s a hundred percent wrong. You can just come out of it so you can see the CDC Center for Disease Control. Is it fair? I mean, this is like all major health departments. It’s actually a movement called undetectable, equal and transmissible. You equal, you undetectable, equal and transmissible. And this is you don’t pass on the virus and then that’s it it goes back to personal responsibility, taking care of ourselves. So it would also and the goal here is to minimize stigma and discrimination.

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Aids and HIV is if they.

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Highest level of stigma and discrimination for generations. Lepra was the one before AIDS and UNAIDS is even worse because AIDS is related to sex and in many cultures, sex is dirty. You know, that’s a bad behavior that the shame also is related to, to gay people, gay men, and which is in many cultures, being gay is evil. So it goes back to our belief system, which is our invitation. This is time also for society, not only getting form that HIV could be one hundred percent preventable, but also it’s time for us to change and look at our belief system that is creating so much pain in the world, stigma and discrimination, just as racism is, I believe, which is unfounded.

Belief is just passed on by generation through generations. So this is time to awaken our mind, to awaken our mind, to see ourselves as a part of a more complex world where we can all make a difference just by changing the way we think and where.

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Do we start changing the mindset at the individual level or where does that happen first? Because I can’t imagine how much an individual with HIV is being held back from living their life fully thanks to carrying this burden off. OK, I cannot be as loving as I want with people that I’m attracted to without this risk of passing it on. Like where do you start changing MindShift? Where do you focus?

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Who do you want to watch yourself?

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Well, it started with the people. We can only change our mindset. Nobody else can change our mindset for us. What we can do is to inform what we can do. It’s more like this. How do we make this message like.

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Make sure of that.

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Millions of people hear this message. That’s what we can do. We can inform, but the mindset is only the person who can do that. Only I can look at my belief system and upgrade to something that is mine, you know, what’s the script that my culture gave me? And that’s who I was told to live by. I realized that is not true. The bias is it’s a learning thing. Being a race is being babies. Don’t, don’t, don’t become. They don’t. There are more races. They are born bigots. They’re more homophobic or, you know, if any kind of negative thinking. That’s something we learn from our cultures. So what we can do is to speak up and say what you believe is not true. And somebody with HIV is just as anyone as today is. You are HIV positive. You can live a full life if you have access to medicine. If you don’t have access to medicine, speak up. Let’s get organized. Let’s make sure that the governments give you the medicine that you need so that we can do that we can use to change communities, to change countries. But for now, let’s inform and let’s invite people to change their mindset. This is like the button to reset. Their mindset is a personal decision.

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I really enjoy hearing you speak from personal responsibility in the way that you do, I think there lives a lot of personal power in that responsibility as well. So if we are going to reach this goal, then with 2030. No people being negatively affected by HIV. What is the bottleneck meaning what do we need to change to get there? Do we need to be better at informing people? Do we need more medicine? What are the biggest obstacles?

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That’s a really good question. So the gold UNAIDS, UNAIDS is a UN agency to fight HIV and AIDS is part of the United Nations. So the goal is called in 1990, 90 goals.

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So by 20, 30, we want 90 percent of the people who are HIV positive to know their status, 90 percent of them on treatment, and 90 percent of them are undetectable. Remember, undetectable means that the medicine is working and you don’t pass on the virus.

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So we can achieve that by all talking about it, but making sure that no one is behind this, no women in the Middle East who have no access to HIV information, that children in some places in middle income countries are low income countries don’t have access to HIV. They should not be one human being born with HIV today. That’s a hundred percent preventable. It should not be a baby born with HIV. Today we can stop it if there is access to HIV tests and this access to medicine. But we need political will. We need to push governments to make sure that they do what they need to do, give access to those things, access to medicine, access to health care, access to information so we can all speak up. That’s the movement that we need to create. Speak up and speak up from Flatt’s.

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I imagine someone listening to this, feeling an urge to speak up, feel inspired by the way that you speak and the way you’re living, your words of acting from kindness, but someone that is not personally affected by HIV. What can they do? Like what would be the first step for them to start taking some kind of action to be kind?

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Well, you don’t have to be what I’m talking to. You have nothing to do with being HIV positive or not. I mean, this is how life is.

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Call me if you come to what we’re going through worldwide with covid, where a for me brings me back to the AIDS

epidemic in the US, for instance, where Facemask became political Suezmax face mask is what the condom is for HIV, where there was no treatment. If back in the 80s and 90s, everyone who wore a condom on this HIV would not be spread out. So is today with Kobe. Everybody wears a mask and gets the social distance. So they have to, we wouldn’t have coffee around the world. So there’s many things that affect us. When you awake our mind and for acts of kindness, we have acts of kindness to nature, making sure that we don’t throw anything on the ocean. The plastic is killing our fish. You know that if you throw garbage on the street, that’s impacting the environment. That if I live my life from the kindness that come from myself, I would have a better community that I can help somebody else to do what we perceive as a challenge.

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So awake in our mind is the calling. You give us freedom, you give us freedom. We can see people as human beings, not as white or black. Not as foreigners and locals, so we will be able to connect with the best of humanity.

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Well said now, if we look at aid for AIDS, then what is your not so much vision, but what are your goals for the next five, 10 years? What would you like to see your organization grow into?

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Well, our organization is very focused on access to HIV to get access to medicines to vulnerable people around the world.

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We focus heavily in Latin America and we’ve been working very diligently on the Venezuelan humanitarian emergency.

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That is, it’s been going through all the refugees and migrant crisis that Venezuelan as a give to to the rest of the region.

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If you’re not familiar with it. The Venezuelan refugee crisis is the second largest in the world right behind the Syrian crisis. And the projections are that it will surpass the Syrian crisis in a few months and so is going to be very serious. And I went to Colombia, which is a neighboring country, to Venezuela about a month ago, and I was able to actually see myself, the migrants they call the workers coming minorities. They walk from cities as Caracas to Lima, Peru and Venezuela. Migrants are the ones that walk the longest distance. So that affects other countries. So we focus on accessing medicine, access and resources and also working on helping people to find the best out of themselves.

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By providing access to what we call basic life skills, we can learn how to have critical thinking, creative thinking, self esteem and take ownership of our lives.

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Also speaking in a positive way, using neuro linguistic programming, which is our shortwave communication. The way we speak is what it comes out of from the inside, and that’s what our brain hears. So when we speak in a negative, that’s what the message we send in to our negative.

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So even the migrant worker, they have power. Every human being, regardless of what they go through, they have a voice that they can awaken. And that’s what we want to do. And that’s what we’ve been doing.

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And we all over Latin America and we in the US, we work with immigrants in New York City and all the is access to resources for to improve their health and more importantly, to improve themselves so they can make the changes they need to make to have the life they want to have.

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What can someone do to support aid for AIDS and help you guys awaken more voices?

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Well, follow us on social media, funding is always, always, although we focus on social impact investment and we look at places, one way is to support us. You can go to our website and donate. You can also send us email and tell you how we treat our messages. Follow us in social media and we can all make a difference. And my invitation to Northmoor.

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I just thank you so much for speaking with greater calm today. This was energizing. I feel super uplifted by your perspectives on human kindness.

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Thank you so much.

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Thank you. And for you listening, if you feel as energized as I am and you would like for more people to hear this interview and for more and more people to know that you can be undetectable and therefore not infect other people with AIDS. Please consider subscribing to this podcast and your podcast app or YouTube. That was great to help us get through the algorithms so more people can hear this conversation. Thank you so much for listening. And we see you in the next episode.

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