Two Decades of World AIDS Day

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of World AIDS Day. The theme continues from the 2007 campaign: Stop AIDS: Keep the PromiseLead, Empower, Deliver. This theme is meant to highlight the fact that many individuals and organizations have already offered up their leadership skills, and now policy makers need to find the resources to deliver on their promises. The campaign is calling on everyone, including families, communities, social organizations, and governments to take the initiative in helping meet the target goals.

Ways you can be a leader in the fight against HIV and AIDS:

Wear a red ribbon today as a symbol of hope, in memory of those lost to AIDS, and in honor of those living with HIV and AIDS.

Find out how the day is being recognized in your community. Some examples: Attend a candlelight vigil, a tree or bulletin board decorating ceremony, a display of NAMES Quilt panels.

Talk about HIV and AIDS in your workplace, at school, on your blog, at church, to your family and friends. How has HIV/AIDS impacted you or someone you know?

Learn more about HIV and AIDS–there are many resources online.

Get tested. Drive someone else to be tested and be supportive.

Contribute time or money, not just on this day, but any day you can, to an organization that assists those living with or impacted by HIV and AIDS.

Let your legislators know that HIV/AIDS matters to you.

For Steve R, Don P, Jeff C, John M, Tim R, Pete M

Houston Pride

You may remember this shot from last year’s Parade.

Here’s this year’s version (“Where’s Rex?”):

It was a great day of Pride, starting with my breakfast at Baby Barnaby’s. I wish they were open all day, because I’m rarely out and about early enough to eat breakfast there.

I have three small stickers on the back of my car which are badly faded. I decided it’s time to replace them, so I went to Hollywood Video/Books to see if I could find duplicates. I got a new PFLAG sticker no problem. But when I asked the cashier about a red ribbon, all I got was a blank look. He honestly didn’t know what a red ribbon is for! I’m still trying to get my head around that.

However, their former manager had bought tons of our books for us to sign. After all these years, there’s one lone copy of The Deal remaining. I thought about buying it–it’s out of print and I only have a couple of copies myself. I decided it’s just waiting for the right reader and left it there.

For the rest of my Pride photos, check out my Flickr set. If you do a slide show, you won’t see titles and captions, but if you go through them individually, I’ve tried to identify most of what I shot.

Houston AIDS Walk

Today was the nineteenth annual AIDS Walk Houston, hosted by AIDS Foundation Houston, sponsored by Chevron, and partnered by other organizations as listed here.

Tom has been volunteering with AIDS-related organizations for thirteen years. First with the NAMES Project, then with a transitional care facility where people with HIV/AIDS lived between a hospital visit and the time they began receiving assistance to live independently. He’s been a volunteer with AIDS Foundation Houston for about six years, and this is his third time to participate in the AIDS Walk. Interestingly, the job he took this year brought him full circle, as he helped oversee a group of Quilt panels that were on display.

According to Tom, around fifteen thousand people participated today, and they surpassed their fundraising goal of one million dollars. So many people walk together with groups of coworkers, and many of their companies offer matching funds. It’s truly a community effort that involves countless volunteer hours and cooperation from many agencies.

One Houstonian is infected with HIV/AIDS every eight hours. Many thousands of Houstonians are here to offer assistance to ensure their quality of life and be there during times of illness. I’m proud to be married to one of those who helps.

You can see the full set of Tom’s photos here on Flickr.

Saturday is World AIDS Day


via GIPHY

I borrowed the idea of the above photo from JeffFunk in memory of Steve R, Don P, Jeff C, John M, Tim R, and Pete M. Thank you, Jeff, and today I will include Sean and Richie in the people I hold good thoughts for.

World AIDS Day is an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV and AIDS. This is the nineteenth annual recognition of World AIDS Day and its theme is “Leadership.” The World AIDS Campaign has launched the Stop AIDS Leadership Pledge. In collaboration with national, regional, international, and constituent partners, the pledge asks people from all over the world to take the lead to stop AIDS. These pledges collected online, by mail and at events, will be used to create exhibitions, banners and other visibility actions during major events in 2008. With a goal of at least 100,000 signees, these pledges will serve as a persuasive tool for leveraging greater political leadership on universal access to AIDS prevention, treatment, care and support and act as a visual example for key national and international decision-makers to follow.

Please wear a red ribbon today in recognition of all those living with HIV/AIDS, impacted by HIV/AIDS, and lost to HIV/AIDS. Thank you.

One week

It’s one week until World AIDS Day on December 1. Please:

Check out what World AIDS Day activities may be available in your area. Commit yourself to doing one thing to increase public awareness of HIV/AIDS, to help someone affected by HIV/AIDS, or to assist an organization that helps those infected with/impacted by HIV/AIDS.

Take the pledge to show leadership in the fight against AIDS by clicking here:

Take the Lead. Register your Pledge NOW!

Put “World AIDS Day 2007” into a search engine and visit a wide array of sites with a wealth of information on the Web if you need ideas or want more information.

Find or make a red ribbon. Wear it any time, but especially on December 1.

Thank you.

click here for activities in Houston

Thinking about creativity

Does anyone remember as a kid collecting money at Halloween to give to UNICEF? Do kids still do that: find ways to raise money and awareness of the plight of children all over the world?

The United Nations Children Fund began in 1946 as a way to help children impacted by World War II, and over the decades, it’s grown into an organization that provides humanitarian relief that helps children globally, focusing on child survival and development; basic education and gender equality (including girls’ education); child protection from violence, exploitation, and abuse; HIV/AIDS and children; and policy advocacy and partnerships for children’s rights.

Here’s how my journey to thinking about UNICEF began.

thanks for reading on

Photo Friday, No. 59

This week’s Photo Friday theme: Unfinished.

A friend was cross-stitching something in Steve R’s hospital room during that last month before he died in 1992. It seemed to soothe her, so later, I began to learn how and thought I’d cross-stitch this simple piece for his parents. They had a white cat named George, and this reminded me of him and their farmhouse in Minnesota. I began it in 1996, intending to give it to them for Christmas. I could never finish it, and eventually I figured out why and wrote a poem about it. The poem and the unfinished cross-stitch are framed together and hang in my house.

Every week the Photo Friday site provides a theme and a list of links to photographers from around the world who’ve submitted a photo for that theme. I don’t count myself among the “real” photographers. I just enjoy coming up with something, either new or from my old photos, to match the theme.


For those of you who visit here via my link on the Photo Friday site, thank you for letting me see your world through your lenses.

The Butterfly Project

You may remember that last week was the tenth anniversary of my first meeting with Tim in our former favorite online chat room. My very first day online, my very first visit to that chat room, I met a woman named Tay from Southern California. It’s so great when two people meet and instantly connect–especially when time proves that the connection is real and enduring. Back then, Tay worked with an HIV/AIDS assistance organization. Our shared experiences taking care of and losing people we loved to AIDS was part of our immediate bond.

Later, Tay changed careers and began teaching middle school. I knew she’d be a dynamic teacher. If I had kids, she’s exactly the kind of teacher I’d want them to have. She’ll never feel like teaching is a matter of forcing knowledge into a kid’s head and then asking the kid to spit it back. A true teacher knows that for a few hours each day, you have the soul of a human being in your care–a human being who is much more than just a “learn this/behave this way” duty.

Effective teaching engages a child’s mind, heart, and body. Such is the goal of The Butterfly Project of the Houston Holocaust Museum. The project was inspired by a poem written by Pavel Friedman. Born in Prague, Friedman was deported to the Terezin Concentration Camp on April 26, 1942, and died in Aushchwitz on September 29, 1944.

A total of 1.5 million children died in the Holocaust. The Houston Holocaust Museum hopes to collect 1.5 million butterflies to honor each of the victims. Tay’s students wanted to be part of this effort, so they learned about the children of Terezin. They made butterflies in their honor. They hung their butterflies in their classroom and shared stories with their fellow students about each child represented by an individual butterfly. Then they learned the fate of those children. If a child died, his or her butterfly was cut down.

I doubt there were many butterflies still floating over their classroom by the end of their project. In all, 15,000 children under the age of 15 passed through Terezin. Less than 100 survived.

By engaging their hands with glue and paper, feathers and sequins, colored markers and beads, ribbon and fabric, pipe cleaners and stickers, Tay took the hearts and minds of a group of Los Angeles children on a journey to the past to honor the lives and mourn the losses of children of the Holocaust. They remembered those who should never be forgotten.

I was honored that Tay sent the butterflies to me to watch over until she came to Houston. When Rhonda–who Tay and I initially also met in that same chat room all those years ago–found out that Tay would be going to the Houston Holocaust Museum, and that Tom and I would join her, to hand over the students’ butterflies, she found a particularly poignant way to say thank you to Tay and her students.

Rhonda’s parents are Holocaust survivors. They and other Houston area survivors included some of their memories and experiences in the book The Album: Shadows of Memory. Rhonda took a copy of the book to her parents and some of the other contributors and had them inscribe it to Tay’s students as a gift. Then she met us at the museum and accompanied us through a tour of the exhibits, sharing a part of herself and her family’s history with us.

It’s hard for me to admit that I have deliberately not gone to the Houston Holocaust Museum, just as I didn’t go to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. I know about the atrocities. Studying the history and literature of both World Wars was a huge part of my academic education, but also my education at home. My father was a WWII vet and a teacher of U.S. history and U.S. military history. I was an infant in my mother’s arms when she toured Dachau Concentration Camp, an experience that had a profound effect on her and which became part of my personal history as I was growing up.

When people say such horrors could never happen again, I usually shake my head and say, “We are always this close to it happening again,” and indicate a minute distance with my fingers. Every time we dehumanize a group of people, every time we close our eyes and ears to injustice and inhumanity, every time we refuse to do anything about genocide anywhere, we decrease that distance a little more.

I’ve always had to be cautious with how much information I take in about the Holocaust. Yesterday, Rhonda helped me understand that if a gift can be taken from this part of our past, it’s knowledge of the amazing will of people to survive, of our resilience, our determination to endure and to emerge from such an experience still able to live with joy, to love, to give life to new generations.

And Tay and her students helped me remember that our greatest hope lies with the willingness of children to be much fairer, much wiser, much kinder than some of the adults who’ve come before them.

Whatever our anguish, however deep, hope is its butterfly.

For more photos, click on the picture, then go up to the gallery.
(Some of the photos have notes. A photo can also be clicked on to enlarge if you need to see it in more detail.)