Subject: Teen With AIDS Virus Tries to Teach Youths Some Lessons for Life
Date: Published: 9/4/91 (482 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    Pedro's Story:
    Teen With AIDS Virus
    Tries to Teach Youths
    Some Lessons for Life
    ---
    At Miami Schools, He Talks
    About Sex, Pain, Death
    -- And His Own Odyssey
    ---
    Education for Kindergarten
    ----
    By Eric Morgenthaler
    Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

    MIAMI -- "What does a person with AIDS look like?"
 19-year-old Pedro Zamora asks the class of fifth- and
 sixth-graders at Golden Glades Elementary School.  Hands fly
 up.
    "Skinny," says a girl near the front.
    "They don't walk good," a boy chimes in.
    "They wet their bed," says another, and her classmates
 giggle.
    Mr. Zamora, who is trim, handsome and healthy-looking,
 calms the children down.  "Let me ask you something," he says.
 "Do I look like I have AIDS?"
    "Nooooooo," the entire class responds.
    "Well, you know what?"
    Starting with this new school year, AIDS education begins
 in kindergarten in Dade County's school system.  And the
 district's most potent weapon against the deadly disease is a
 disarming young man named Pedro "Peter" Zamora.
    As this morning unfolds, his back-and-forth with
 schoolchildren reaches a level of explicitness -- as much in
 their questions as his answers -- that might shock many
 adults.  Yet no one here is shocked -- except when they hear
 that the teen-ager talking to them is infected with the HIV
 virus, which causes AIDS.  
    ---
    "I remember a year ago being in this very room in this
 very class," Pedro tells the students in Room 810 of Hialeah
 High School.  "And everybody was saying they hadn't been
 touched by AIDS.  
    "And yet that boy in that seat -- an honor student, an
 athlete, not a troublemaker, and pretty popular at school --
 was HIV-positive.
    "A lot of us feel AIDS is never going to touch our lives.
 I felt that way, too."
    ---
    The storm blew up soon after the Sinthia M. left the Cuban
 port of Mariel stuffed with about 250 refugees.  It was May
 30, 1980, the sixth week of the Mariel boatlift, which
 brought 125,000 Cubans to Florida shores.
    Pedro Zamora, eight years old, had never been on a boat
 before.  He was very seasick.
    Pedro and his grandmother were huddled on a crowded bunk
 inside the boat's cabin.  Pedro was wearing his best clothes:
 a Superman T-shirt an uncle had brought from America and blue
 cotton pants his mother had made from one of her skirts; she
 used red thread rather than blue because blue thread, like so
 much else, was scarce in Castro's Cuba, especially for
 families as poor as the Zamoras.
    The other members of Pedro's family -- his parents, Hector
 and Zoraida; his 15-year-old sister, Milagros; his
 12-year-old brother, Jesus -- sat outside on benches in the
 rain.  People were jammed so tightly together that the seasick
 had to vomit in place.  The rain washed it away.
    Surrounding the passengers, separated only by a rope, was
 a grotesque chorus of murderers, thieves, rapists, insane
 people, the dreadfully sick, the horribly impaired.  They had
 been put on board by the Castro regime, which was using the
 boatlift to empty its prisons and mental hospitals.
    The trip had torn apart Pedro's family:  His five oldest
 siblings had been left behind in Cuba.  Although the oldest
 one, a married sister, had never intended to leave, the other
 four, all brothers, planned to go.  For five days, they were
 processed along with everyone else.  Finally, the day the boat
 was loaded, they were told they couldn't leave because they
 were at or nearing draft age.  One was the twin of Pedro's
 sister Milagros.
    The senior Zamoras said they wouldn't leave their sons.
 But the sons insisted the rest of the family go, to give the
 younger children a chance at a better life.  They said they'd
 join their family when the Castro regime fell, which everyone
 assumed would be soon.
    The trip to Key West took 13 hours.  As Pedro walked off
 the boat, tightly clutching his mother's hand, a man gave him
 an apple.  Pedro looked at his mother, and tears filled their
 eyes.  His brother Pancho, who they'd left behind, had said
 the first thing he wanted to do in America was eat an apple.
    ---
    May 1991 Dear Peter,
    Hi! How are you feeling?  I hope good.  Well I'm all right.
 I'm the girl {at a middle school in an upper-middle-class
 neighborhood near Miami} that asked you how you reacted when
 you found out that you had AIDS.  Well when I saw you walk in
 the door I couldn't believe that you had AIDS.  It's just that
 you're so good looking and nice.  Well I'm just writing to ask
 you to please write me and tell me how you're doing when you
 have the chance, at least twice a week if you can ok?  
    Well I gotta go.  Good luck and please write me soon.
    Love,
    Milly
    P. S. If you want to call me, please don't call past 10:00
 p.m.
    ---
    After two or three months, the Zamoras in the U. S. and the
 Zamoras in Cuba finally got a phone call through.  The call
 lasted only four minutes, but it didn't matter.  Everyone was
 crying so hard they couldn't talk.
    Milagros remembers her birthday that year.  She wanted it
 to be happy, but it also was the birthday of her twin,
 Pancho, and he was in Cuba.  Her mother cried the whole day.
    For Pedro, however, the sadness was always fleeting.  He
 was eight years old.  He was having a great time in this new
 land.  He was thrilled to discover a swimming pool at the
 apartment complex his family moved to in Hialeah, west of
 Miami.  Pedro had never seen a swimming pool before.
    School was in English, and the Mariel refugees were spread
 around, to force them to adapt.  Pedro, who arrived speaking
 only Spanish, found it easy to communicate.  In difficult
 situations, he would rely on the only other Spanish-speaker
 in his class, a Puerto Rican girl who was fluent in English.
    The first time Pedro recited the alphabet in English, all
 the kids in his class applauded.
    Pedro's father quickly got a job mowing lawns, and later
 he began working in construction.  Pedro's mother found work
 in a T-shirt factory.  The family had a two-bedroom apartment:
 the parents in one bedroom, Milagros and her grandmother in
 the second, and Pedro and Jesus on the sofa bed in the living
 room.
    As the years went on, the hollowness of the family's
 assumption that Castro soon would fall -- and the family be
 reunited -- gnawed at everyone.  Pedro's mother would have
 pangs of loneliness while in the kitchen.  She was used to
 cooking for big family gatherings, and the process itself
 reminded her that five of her eight children weren't here.
    "I always remember my mother saying she didn't want all
 these material things, she just wanted everybody to be
 together again," says Pedro's brother Jesus.  "We didn't have
 food in Cuba, we didn't have money, and we like it much
 better here.  But we were happier over there because we were
 all together."
    Mrs. Zamora and Pedro were especially close.  He was the
 baby of the family, and she treated him as her special child.
 He and his mother would watch movies on television together.
 They would play card games and Chinese checkers.  They would
 dance to old Cuban music.  They would talk for hours.
    When Pedro was 11, a mole on his mother's face began to
 change shape.  By the time she went to a doctor, in June 1983,
 cancer had spread.  She continued to work for more than a
 year, but her condition worsened.  One morning, in the spring
 of 1985, Pedro's mother asked him, "If I were to die and
 could leave you anything you wanted, what would it be?"
    He joked that she had so many millions of dollars he
 didn't know how many to ask for.  But she said, "No, really."
 And he told her that he always had loved her hair.  It was
 long and black and cascaded down her back.  For religious
 reasons -- she worshiped a saint named Ochun in a
 Cuban-African faith called Santeria -- she never cut her
 hair.
    Mrs. Zamora told Pedro that although she couldn't cut her
 hair, she somewhere had a few locks that had been cut before
 she converted.  Someday she would look for them, she said.
    That afternoon, when Pedro returned from school, he found
 two pieces of folded, lined paper in one of his drawers.
 Inside were locks of his mother's hair.  It wasn't until she
 died, six weeks later, that it struck him she must have spent
 the entire day looking for them.
    "Her death affected everything," says Pedro's sister
 Milagros.  "She was the one who kept things together.  She was
 the leader of the family.  When she died, it was very hard.  We
 separated, even though we were together, and we each worked
 out our problems our own way."
    ---
    "How did you catch AIDS?" a girl near the front asks at an
 experimental school for former and would-be high-school
 dropouts in downtown Miami.
    "I got it through sexual contact," Pedro answers.  "I am
 sure of that, because I never had a blood transfusion, I
 never used intravenous drugs, and I had been sexually
 active."
    "Where is the person now?" another girl asks.
    "I really don't know who I got it from," he responds, and
 a low "ooooooo" ripples through the audience.
    "It was during a period of my life when I was very
 promiscuous, when I had more than one partner."
    He pauses.
    "My mother died when I was 13."  The room becomes quiet.
    "In dealing with her death -- or not dealing with it -- I
 did two things.  I spent all my energies in school:  I ran
 track, I took honors classes, I was active in everything.  And
 the second thing I did was I went out and partied.  Because
 the main thing was I didn't want to be home, because when I
 was home I had to face my mother's death.
    "I found that through sex, I could get some of the things
 that were missing in my life -- the hugs and the kisses, the
 attention, the affection."
    A student raises her hand.
    "I sometimes think that if I die, I will be with my
 grandfather in heaven," she says.  "Do you ever think that if
 you die, you will go to heaven and be with your mom?  And does
 that comfort you?"
    Pedro answers gently, saying he sometimes has such
 thoughts but he really doesn't think about death much.
    Afterward, though, he says he felt that was a very nice
 question.
    ---
    Pedro took honors classes at Hialeah Junior High School
 and was captain of the cross-country squad.  He was president
 of the Science Club.  His class voted him "best all-around"
 and "most intellectual" boy.  The city of Hialeah named him
 "student of the month," and he got a letter from the mayor.
 He didn't drink, smoke or use drugs.  "The girls all thought
 he was the hottest thing around," says one teacher.  The
 faculty raved about him.
    "Pedro Zamora is one of the finest young men that I have
 met during my teaching career," the head of the school's
 English department wrote in a letter nominating him for an
 award.
    At home, his family joked that Pedro was the only one with
 "clean hands" -- meaning he'd never done hard labor.  They
 said that he, unlike the other men in the family, would go to
 college.  They predicted he'd become a doctor or a lawyer.
 They called him "the executive."
    But there was the other side to Pedro's life that most
 people didn't see.  It was downright suicidal, although Pedro
 didn't understand that at the time.
    "When I was in seventh grade, a doctor came in to talk to
 our class," he says.  "He wore a three-piece suit and had gray
 hair and was talking about AIDS as their disease, not our
 disease.  His attitude was that we know you will never need
 this information because you aren't sexually active, but
 we're giving it to you anyway.  He didn't talk about sex
 practices.  He didn't talk about condoms.  He didn't talk about
 testing.
    "I came out of that with the notion that I didn't have to
 do anything about it.  AIDS couldn't happen to me.  Nothing I
 ever heard later changed that notion.  And I am very angry
 about that."
    ---
    "I finally got my act together, after a year or two of
 promiscuity," Pedro tells a high school class.  "Then I
 received a letter from the Red Cross, telling me there was a
 problem with the blood I'd given in a school blood drive, and
 asking me to come in and see them."
    ---
    He got the news on Nov. 9, 1989.  After ignoring several
 letters from the Red Cross, he finally went to his doctor to
 get tested for the HIV virus.  When the nurse told him he had
 tested positive, he didn't react.  Once he got back to his
 car, alone, he fell apart.  He drove 130 blocks down Biscayne
 Boulevard to a friend's apartment, crying the entire way.  He
 could barely see.
    It was his sister Milagros's 25th birthday.  He tried to
 get out of the family dinner, but she insisted he attend.  He
 went and never let on that anything was wrong.  In the
 pictures of that evening, he is smiling.
    He says that wasn't the worst day of his life.  The worst
 day of his life, he says, was the day he made the trip from
 Mariel.
    When at last he told his family, a couple of weeks later,
 they were devastated.  "It was like a door closing," says his
 father, Hector, who now works for a yacht builder.  "My first
 question was, why not me?  I am old and have lived my life.
 Here is a young man whose life is just beginning."
    ---
    "How should we behave toward people who are HIV-positive?"
 a high-school teacher asks.
    "How would you behave toward someone with cancer or
 diabetes or any other serious disease?" Pedro responds.
 "Treat it like something normal.  Don't treat it like a big
 deal.
    "A lot of us want to tell people, but we don't want to
 tell you if you're going to start crying and carrying on.
    "There are two things I hate.  I hate it when people tell
 me that everything is going to be all right.  And I hate it
 when they say they understand what I am going through.
 Because they really don't understand.  They can't.
    "What I need is somebody to listen to me.  Somebody to hug
 me or hold my hand.  Somebody to cry with me, to say it's all
 right to cry, it's all right to be angry.  Somebody to say I
 wish I could do something but there is nothing I can do.
    "Because there is nothing you can do to change how I am
 going to feel.  You don't have a cure, you don't have an
 answer.  All you can do is be there for me."
    ---
    In April of last year, Pedro woke up one morning with
 blisters on his lips.  Two days later, he was in a hospital
 emergency room, his face covered with shingles.  He thought he
 was going to die.  He was in the hospital more than two weeks.
 His room was usually filled with family, friends, flowers and
 cards, but when he jotted down his thoughts at the time, he
 wrote:  "I feel so lonely and abandoned."  He recovered at home
 for another month or six weeks.  He doesn't have health
 insurance.
    He missed two months of school without ever telling the
 school exactly what was wrong.  On returning, he told his
 counselor that he had AIDS.  The man was so stunned he barely
 could speak.  "I had to apologize to him for the reaction,"
 the counselor says.  "I was shocked, and that wasn't going to
 help him at all."
    He went to summer school.  One day, his class was
 discussing homosexuality.  He listened as several classmates
 made disparaging comments about gays.  One boy bragged about
 having beat up a gay man.  Pedro exploded.  Quivering with
 anger, he said the comments about gays were based on vicious
 stereotypes.
    He was gay, he said.  If these guys knew so much about
 gays, why hadn't they known that?  
    In the weeks that followed, he began giving talks about
 AIDS in his classes, without disclosing his condition.  Last
 fall, after he got his diploma, he decided to go public.
    ---
    "What makes you care about people like us?" a boy asks
 near the end of one question-and-answer session at an
 inner-city high school.  "You could have told nobody.  You
 could have just forgotten the world.  What makes you care?"
    It's a question Pedro seldom gets, and he pauses before
 answering.
    "The pain that I feel," he begins.  "The anger, the hurt.  I
 don't want anybody else to go through this.
    "Nobody deserves to get this disease.  I don't care who
 they are or what they did.  I don't care if they are a mugger.
 Nobody deserves to go through what I have been through.
 Nobody.
    "You think it's easy to be here and be personal and answer
 all these questions?  It's not.  But if you see me, you might
 realize it could happen to you.  That is why I am here."
    ---
    Although he'd had a lifelong fear of public speaking,
 Pedro signed on last fall as a speaker with a local AIDS
 group.  He quickly came to the attention of the Dade County
 public school system, which began booking him for high-school
 appearances.  Soon, he was in heavy demand.  Pedro, now often
 called Peter, looks like a high-schooler himself -- dressed
 in jeans, a knit shirt and sport shoes, his black hair
 brushed back -- but he handles himself with easy assurance.
 "How you guys doin'?" he begins in his accented English.
    "I think Peter's presentation has more of an impact than
 any lecture any of the teachers can ever give," says Nadine
 Gay, AIDS education supervisor for the school district, where
 the AIDS crisis is hitting even the earliest grades as babies
 born with the virus reach school age.  "He is someone the
 students can relate to.  He is another teen-ager."
    He now typically spends several days a week talking to
 classes.  The school district doesn't pay him, but Body
 Positive Resource Center Inc., a Miami AIDS organization,
 recently secured a grant that provides him a small salary.  He
 also speaks to local civic, church and corporate groups.  A
 recent panel appearance at Southern Bell in Miami got such a
 strong response that the company plans to have Pedro back for
 a special session with teenage children of employees.
    Pedro tailors his appearances to individual groups.
 Sometimes he gives what he calls his "AIDS 101" lecture, but
 he often just fields questions.  He follows the school
 district's teaching guidelines, but the guidelines are
 liberal and his presentations are explicit.  A few schools
 require parental permission for students to attend the
 sessions; few parents withhold it.
    ---
    "I am a very open person," says Pedro, "so you can ask me
 whatever you want."
    "Why didn't you use a condom?" a sixth-grader at Golden
 Glades Elementary asks.
    "Because I didn't think I was going to get AIDS.  The
 person didn't look like they had AIDS and I didn't worry
 about it.  I thought you could tell if a person had AIDS by
 what they looked like.  But you can't.  If you are doing that,
 if you're having sex, you should use a condom."
    ---
    Pedro tells students that abstention from sex and drugs is
 an answer to AIDS.  "There's a myth going around the schools
 that everybody is having sex, especially the boys, and that's
 not true," he tells one class.  "If you don't want to have
 sex, you don't have to."
    However, it's clear that many students want other answers.
 In a survey last year of 2,000 Dade County students in grades
 nine through 12, 63% said they had engaged in sexual
 intercourse.  Thus, Pedro's talks often cover everything from
 needle-sterilization techniques for drug users to how to use
 a condom.  "In opening the package," he starts out, "you don't
 use your teeth because using your teeth could break the
 condom.  So you want to open it with your hand."
    "I am not there to judge their behavior," Pedro says
 later.  "I am there to modify it."
    The questions he gets from adult audiences are tame
 compared with those from kids.  But during recent visits to
 seven Miami-area schools, Pedro never gave an audience
 anything it didn't seem ready for.  Teachers uniformly praised
 the sessions.  Students generally were engaged, attentive and
 full of questions.
    In his presentations, Pedro sidesteps questions about his
 own sexual orientation.  That tactic reflects the school
 district's -- and Pedro's -- approach of stressing that AIDS
 threatens everyone, not just certain groups.  Most students
 seem to assume he is heterosexual.  "Do you kiss your
 girlfriend on the mouth?" a high-school girl asks -- but his
 answers usually are gender-neutral:  "Yes, I do kiss."
    "Most people want me to say I am a homosexual, a drug
 addict, a prostitute, a hemophiliac -- because if they aren't
 any of those things, they feel safe," he tells one class.
 "But that isn't true.  You are not safe.  AIDS is out there, if
 you engage in high-risk behavior.  Anybody can get it."
    The number of reported AIDS cases among teen-agers is
 relatively low -- 715, in the most recent Centers for Disease
 Control tabulation -- but the figure doesn't reflect people,
 such as Pedro Zamora, who are infected with the virus but
 haven't developed AIDS.  The extent of teen-age infection
 isn't known, since most teens don't get tested for the virus
 and symptoms can take years to appear.  However, educators
 worry that many young people are putting themselves at risk
 simply because they're so poorly informed about AIDS.  
    "There's a lot of ignorance," says J. R. Gourley, director
 of Teens Teaching AIDS Prevention, a group based in Kansas
 City, Mo., that runs a national AIDS hotline for teens
 (1-800-234-TEEN).  "We get asked things that are almost
 unbelievable."  Although it has just two lines and operates
 only from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. weekdays, the hotline gets 2,000
 to 3,000 calls a month from teen-agers, most seeking
 information about AIDS, Mr. Gourley says.
    ---
    "Do you still go out and have fun?" a grade-schooler asks.
    "Sure," Pedro replies.  "I go out and play baseball.  I go
 out and dance.  I go out to the movies.  I go out to Pizza Hut.
 I do almost everything you guys would do."
    ---
    Pedro Zamora plans to start college next year.  He hopes
 eventually to be a counselor on death and dying.  Meanwhile,
 he is reasonably healthy -- aside from the shingles last
 year, he hasn't had a major illness -- and he leads a normal
 life.
    His brother Hector Jr., or Tico, got out of Cuba several
 years ago and joined the family in Hialeah, but the others
 are still on the island.
    As for Pedro's future, the family is realistic but
 hopeful.  "I don't know why God chose us to go through this,
 but I do have faith and I do have hope," Pedro's father says.
 "I know there are many people in this world who are fighting
 for a solution."
    Pedro has a buoyant personality and an easy charm, and
 people are drawn to him.  He says he never has been rejected
 because of his illness.  Yet the specter of AIDS haunts
 everything.  Recently, he noticed a small purplish spot on his
 shoulder.  His first reaction was terror:  He thought it was
 Kaposi's Sarcoma, one of the most lethal of AIDS-related
 illnesses.  "Then I said to myself, `Oh, don't worry about it.
 Maybe it's just a spot,'" he recalls.
    And it was just a spot.  He had moved into a new apartment
 that weekend and apparently bruised himself carrying boxes.
 In a few days, the spot went away.  "It was nothing," he says.
 "But every time you get a little mark on your body, every
 time your stomach gets upset or something else happens, the
 first thing that comes to mind is AIDS."
    ---
    "Do you ever think that when the time comes to -- you know
 -- go on, you'll get scared?" a girl near the back of her
 high-school classroom asks.
    "I get scared now," Pedro replies.  "I get very scared.
    "It isn't always about death, because death was never a
 negative thing to me.  To me, death is just a change.  What
 really scares me is the process.  It's being sick, being in
 the hospital, having my family suffer, not being able to take
 care of myself.  That scares me a lot."
    "Do you have any thoughts about killing yourself?" asks a
 boy at another high school.
    "No, not really," Pedro says.  "I never thought seriously
 of suicide.  The way I was brought up, it's something you just
 don't do.  Life is a gift from God, and only God can take it
 away.
    "The way I look at it is today I am pretty healthy, today
 what I have to do is learn to live with AIDS.  If tomorrow
 death or sickness or a cure comes along, I will deal with
 that then."

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the
 personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the
 hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering
 from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]