A beautiful hawk sat over me one clear day in San Francisco. I watched it fly from time to time and was reminded of a story shared with me on a similarly beautiful day.

Like kites, or war planes

People 50 years or older now make up the majority of HIV and AIDS cases in San Francisco. Since HIV emerged in the 1980's, treatments have improved -- allowing people to live longer with this chronic illness. So as the number of older people living with HIV grows, so do the other things that come with age -- like access to affordable housing and health care, mental health issues and isolation. 
 
Affordable Housing

Joe Childress is an HIV-positive senior. He was diagnosed with HIV in 1987. He didn’t expect to survive, but he did. He’s had to manage his illness, and everything that goes along with it, for decades. After years of struggling to find a safe and affordable place to live, he heard about the AIDS Housing Alliance, a nonprofit that offers housing services to people living with HIV. They helped him enroll in a housing lottery out of the Mayor’s Office, and he won.

Monthly rent in his building is usually in the $3-4,000 range, but because he qualified for Section 8, Childress pays just $125 a month for his apartment.

But Childress was lucky. Low-income, HIV-positive seniors usually struggle to find affordable housing. Many are disable, live on a fixed income, and some fear that their landlords would discriminate against them for having a chronic illness.

Dr. Patrick Arbore is founder and director of the Center for Elderly Suicide Prevention and Grief Related Services at the Institute on Aging. He says, “if you lose your housing, first of all, you lose your home where you might have been for 30 years or whatever it might have been, 40 years. And then, to try to figure out how do you find a new place that is affordable in the city currently is really hard. And so you have to look at the East Bay or Vallejo. But then, you lose your network of support.”

Dr. Arbore says life as a low-income senior with HIV can feel like a series of tradeoffs. This struggle is most obvious when it comes to expensive medications.

Choosing Between Quality of Life and Expensive Medications

Like most people with HIV, Childress has dozens of pills to take every morning and every night.

“The average number of medications an older person takes ranges from 8-12 prescriptions per year and when you think that one of those prescriptions might be $450 a month, you can see how quickly that adds up,” says Dr. Arbore. “And so we are making people choose between quality of life and their medications. We’re asking them to make a really difficult decision.”

Childress estimates that it’s at least $4000 a month for his medications. But again, he’s fortunate. Most of them are covered under Medi-Cal. Dr. Arbore says many seniors end up paying for their medication out of pocket because they have trouble navigating the system.

For all the luck Childress has had in getting housing and financial help, he’s still struggling with feeling alone. He has lost many friends to AIDS over the years.

“It was like in 1982 and a friend would say 'well, you know I don't feel well,’ and then they died. I have for some reason not been able to forget them,” says Childress. This is a common topic at Childress’ weekly support group.

Staying Connected to a Community

Scott Haitsuka is a program coordinator at Open House SF, a nonprofit that helps LGBT seniors in San Francisco with their housing and mental health needs. There, Haitsuka facilitates a meet up for HIV-positive men over the age of 50.

The room feels safe, intimate. Most of these men have known each other for years. I joined them for a session right before the holidays, and it was a particularly tough time for some of them.

Haitsuka is the facilitator, but he has lived through similar challenges. He lost his partner of 17 years to AIDS in 2006.

“All of these group members have experienced a tremendous amount of loss. They have lived in San Francisco, some of them since the late 60s, early 70s. When the HIV epidemic hit, it wiped out a community, if not a generation of men,” says Haitsuka.

Due to aging, these men continue to lose friends and members of their chosen family. Haitsuka believes groups like these help HIV-positive seniors stay connected to a community.

It’s one of the many things Joe Childress says he’s lucky to have.

“I myself am grateful that I have what I have to help me survive. I am heartbroken that people that need the same or similar conditions, do not have it,” says Childress.

He says his hope is that more people will be able to count on the services that have been available to him, and that one day his story will be commonplace.

Living with HIV as a senior

Tio Polo, as many call him, migrated to Nezahualcoyotl from Oaxaca. This migration was common among Oaxacan in the 1960's and 70s. After completing his education and holding many odd jobs, he decided he would put his love of tacos to work. He's run his taco stand with pride for 20 years.


Tio Polo, como muchos lo llaman, emigró a Nezahualcoyotl desde Oaxaca. Esta migración era común entre los oaxaqueños en los años 1960 y 70. Después de completar su educación y intentar varios trabajos, decidió poner su amor de tacos a trabajar. Ha corrido su puesto de tacos con orgullo desde hace 20 años.

Nezahualcoyotl, Mexico

Los Tacos de Tio Polo (Spanish)

Happy birthday, tia S-A-R-A

Published by KALW on May 19, 2014.

D’Wana Stewart is a native San Franciscan. She graduated from June Jordan School for Equity, a small high school on the southeast side of the city. Now 24, she's working three jobs and shares a home with her mother – it’s the only way she’s been able to stay in San Francisco. We spent a week with D’wana, to get a sense of her life, living on the minimum wage.

"Definitely like to be further ahead in my life. Even though it seems like I’m doing so much." – D'wana Stewart

Living Wage: Profile of a low-wage earner

Over 6,000 migrant deaths were recorded on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico between 1998 and 2013. The true number of deaths is likely higher, and thousands of families never hear from their loved ones again. This documentary travels to the desert ranch lands of Brooks County and the border town of Reynosa, Tamaulipas to introduce us to the human cost of “prevention through deterrence,” a border enforcement strategy introduced during the Clinton administration.

Deadly Divide - Excerpt

I walked home late at night, and received the first half of this message from my 5-year old and a 9-year-old nephews. 

Once upon a time in New Orleans...

This story was produced for KCRW's 24-hour Radio Race.

In the city of New Orleans - the Big Easy - it's a syrupy, sultry, slow passage of time. For Johnny Angel, time changes everything.

NOLA: Crawfish and Cowboys

She had a mechanical heart valve that ticked like a clock. Tick, tick...tick, tick. The ticking of her heart was a reminder that our time was limited. My grandmother, who I called mom, passed away when I was eleven years old. At that age, I saw her departure from my world as an injustice. I silently pleaded with her not to leave, but soon after I heard the cries down the hall. I could have gone there, but I stayed still, afraid, until someone came for me in the morning. 

She used to heal wounded birds, and spoil her hamster Charlie. She’d let her parakeets fly free in the den and prepare baths for them. I looked forward to my bowl of lovingly peeled, chopped, and chilled fruit every day. Today I do the same for my nephew - carefully slicing nectarines and placing them in a bowl next to him as he paints. He smiles, then I smile. 

This is an audio excerpt from a long-term project that will tell the story of my childhood experiences. Thanks to my grandmother’s love of audio documentation, I can be there again, and I can hear the happiness in my own voice before several traumatic events took place. 

Many thanks to my muse and life-long collaborator in Florianopolis, Brazil for encouraging me to listen. You breathe passion into my life and projects, Rita Piffer.

Maria Bonita

Camille was the second person that came forward after I did in 2014. She was one of many children abused by my grandfather, and one that experienced the most devastating effects of trauma. 

When she heard I had come forward, she was living in a court-appointed recovery home. Coming forward changed her life significantly. Today, Camille is rebuilding her life, working in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility, and proudly speaks about her experience on panels for people in recovery from addiction.

Camille will be a voice in Silent Beauty.

www.SilentBeautyFilm.com

Camille

Jasmin Mara López is a journalist, documentary filmmaker, and audio producer based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Born in the U.S. with familial roots in México, her childhood was affected by issues experienced on both sides of the U.S.- México border. This instilled in her a strong passion for immigrant rights, youth empowerment, and social change.

In 2007, Jasmin founded Project Luz, a non-profit initiative that empowers youth to share stories within their communities utilizing audio and photojournalism techniques. She has worked for USC Annenberg’s Civic Engagement and Journalism Initiative where she coordinated a program that trained immigrant youth in journalistic ethics and practice, and she was a recipient of the 2015 Society of Professional Journalists’ Excellence in Journalism Award for her documentary Deadly Divide: Migrant Death on the Border. 

Jasmin is currently working on Silent Beauty, a film about her family’s history with child sexual abuse and their culture of silence. She is also developing an installation with the voices of dozens of survivors to accompany the film. Jasmin participated in the 2017 New Orleans Film Society Emerging Voices Mentorship Program, 2018 UnionDocs Summer Documentary Lab, and was awarded the 2017 Third Coast Radio Residency at Ragdale, 2018 Southern Documentary Fund Production Grant, 2019 Chicken & Egg Pictures Accelerator Lab, 2019 Jacqui Jones Memorial Scholarship by Black Public Media, and the 2019 Artist Residency and Fellowship at Ragdale.

Jasmin Mara

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