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22-year-old Kerrel works with young people to help them learn about HIV and AIDS in Jamaica. She co-launched UNICEF’s Global Campaign on Children and AIDS in 2005. Here, she talks to Youth Voice about what it was like having a father living with HIV, and how this led to her founding the Portland AIDS Association.
Youth Voice: What do you do for a living?
Kerrel McKay: I work for the Ministry of Health in Kingston at the headquarters. I’m the Youth Interventions Coordinator and basically what I do is develop and implement programmes for young people both in and out of school which relate to sexual and reproductive health issues.
Before we move onto what you do here at Portland, just a bit about your Dad... he died of AIDS-related illnesses?
Yes when I was thirteen.
Did you always know that your father had HIV?
I was told by my mum – I think it was because she was scared. I was really close to my Dad – she told me when I was nine, I don’t know how old I was when he got infected but she told me and from then I knew he was ill. It’s something that everybody is afraid of - “do not say anything to anybody else”. But he was my Dad – he wasn’t any different. I still loved him and we still did everything together.
You had to keep it a secret then?
Oh yes from everyone, I didn’t want to tell my friends, my neighbours... because at that time people were very discriminating. Even if you’re not the person infected people would still say really bad things about you and they did not want to touch you or talk to you so you had to keep these things secret and I did.
So, as a result of that why did you set up the Portland AIDS Committee?
It was after my Dad died and basically I was the person who took care of him while he was alive. I was very young and still going to school, but I had to take care of his meals and everything else. When he died and I shared with others what I had done people were very impressed. Then they started saying “you have a lot to offer”. That’s when I started telling my friends “I want us to do more, let’s start talking out about this”; I was discriminated against by people and I felt how hard it was to keep all this a secret. That’s when I started the Portland AIDS Association for youth. The young people started visiting those who were HIV-positive and started taking care of them and we started visiting people’s homes and just talking to them. We went into schools and did HIV/AIDS education and we started going out into communities.
How long has the PAA been going now?
I have been involved in HIV/AIDS education for more than 7 years now, but the group started 5 years ago. It used to be a small group of us who met in the library until we started then to meet at the old marina before this place was given to us. Before we used to have a lot of computers but then they got broken. Now we are planning to offer the centre as a space for young people where they can come and access information. We are going to have a nurse here so young people can have HIV tests and also SRH counselling, as well as it being a space where young people can meet and discuss issues that affect them.
What other things do you do apart from the ‘walk and talk’?
[A ‘walk and talk’ is where Kerrel and her colleagues go out into communities asking people on the street how much they know about HIV and doing condom demonstrations.] We are developing different aspects. A ‘walk and talk’ is one segment of TCI (Targeted Community Intervention), now the young people want to target one community at a time for a period of 6 months and do TCI. What we are doing now is behaviour change so it’s not just going in and coming out, but saturating the environment by providing all the information necessary – building all the skills of the people within that community so that when we pull out they can sustain whatever intervention we brought to them. That is what we are moving into now, more outreach programmes. We are also going into schools training peer educators, but this to some extent has not worked because you train a group of young people and nothing happens; they are trained and they walk away with the knowledge. So we are developing strategies and ways in which we can get these young people trained and have them use whatever skills they have to reach their peers.