The six Oberlin alumni seated at the front of Craig Lecture Hall this past Tuesday night had two things in common: they were all Shansi alumni, and they were all involved in the struggle for HIV and AIDS prevention. 

“What’s exciting to me about these people,” said symposium organizer and Professor of Religion Paula Richman, “is that they got their start through Shansi, and then they moved throughout the world to build on their experiences and help combat this epidemic at a global level.”

The symposium, “Bodies, Practice, Research and Art: The Ethics of HIV/AIDS, Research and Treatment in a Cross Cultural Context,” is among the final events in Shansi’s centennial celebration. The alumni, Michael Chung, OC ’90; Michele Clark, OC ’91 and Viviane Chao, Jonathan Ripley and Aparna Jain, all OC ’97, also spoke to students on Wednesday at noon in King 106 about the difficulties and delights of working in a field where so much remains to be done.

The speakers came with a desire to communicate the magnitude of the problem with the audience, wielding PowerPoint presentations teeming with statistics, but they also stressed the importance of not losing the personal stories in the statistics.

Chung, a visiting research scientist at the University of Nairobi, offered to “bring it down to the individual level to make it more real for all of you,” by sharing the story of Grace and Eunice, a mother and daughter who were some of the first patients treated by the Tumaini Project in which he was involved. Tumaini, which means “hope” in Swahili, now offers free drugs to 3,500 people despite the concern that there are not sufficient funds to treat them for life and that ending treatment could breed resistant strains of the virus.

Chao, the Kenya Deputy Country Coordinator for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, was dealing with  problems in Kenya, since post-election strife has destabilized people’s lives and medicinal regimens. 

Chao believes PEPFAR — which has been given a five-year operating budget of $19 billion and works in 15 target countries to treat, care for and prevent future infection of the local population — has been effective. “People [with the disease] have been able to stay healthy, go to work, raise families and obviously this wasn’t happening five years ago,” she said.  Gere later concurred in a backhanded fashion that drew audience laughter, saying, “It’s commonly said that this is the only great program this president has developed.”

While the general consensus was that PEPFAR was showing results, the speakers agreed that the ideal for their programs was to create sustainability, even in the face of disappearing grants. “We should always work in the spirit of self-erasure,” said Ripley, the manager of the Service Corps Fellowship in New Delhi, a part of the American India Foundation. 

Even when funding is easily available for an organization, there is immense pressure to show results — which are not always easily quantifiable — to benefactors. “Do you just say, ‘Yes we trained 10,000 [inefficiently] in eight months or do you say, ‘We trained 2,000 through really in-depth two-week trainings and our follow-up evaluation showed that doctors were more likely to care for people with HIV/AIDS?” asked Clark, the former deputy director of the International Training & Education Center on HIV in India.

Executive Director of Shansi Carl Jacobson related by e-mail that “Shansi has tried to put [this] issue before the campus community through symposia and lectures on the subject going back…as far as I can remember.” He continued, “This topic was chosen because we feel that it showcases an extremely important area of work that Shansi Fellows may be uniquely qualified to do because of their early exposure as Shansi Fellows to other cultures and languages and to the particular challenges that exist in those cultures and societies.”

But perhaps the simplest, most inspiring message to take away can be found in the image of the Hindu deity Hanuman that adorned the fliers for the symposium. “In the epic, the Ramayana…[Hanuman] has to go across the universe to find an herb that will save someone who’s dying, and time is running out and only he has the power to go there fast and he gets there,” said Professor Richman. “He ends up bringing back the whole mountain because he can’t remember the herb. And to me it’s about the monumentality of the obstacles to dealing with AIDS but it’s also about the power of people who really persevere and manage to save lives.”