#ripa

Ripa VII - Michel Buylen

Belgian, b. 1953 -

So, I visited Ribe Viking Center this summer and it was an amazing experience. Just for reference when I mention Ripa, the old viking town that is remodeled here, in the story. This is where I imagine the narrator grew up. The pictures from the longhouse are of the reconstruction of the Hviding farm longhouse.

Why am I talking about it now? Well for years it was too sad to talk about my experiences in AIDS activism. So many people I knew died, friends, aquaintances. Too many people died. And I was so young when I joined the fight.

How did I get into it? My bat mitzvah, no seriously, my Jewish coming of age ceremony. To be bar or bat mitvahed (bar is for boys and bat is for girls) you have to do a certain amount of community service and my rabbi encouraged us all to go out and do something that really mattered and wasn't easy. I was 12 years old and I needed to do a year long community service project to be bat mitzvahed at 13. And HIV/AIDS was everywhere and it mattered.

I heard about an ACT UP protest at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence (RI's capital city) and begged my mother to take me. This disease was everywhere. Gay and bisexual men were being treated as though this was a punishment from G-d, IV drug users were treated the same way. Children with the disease were kicked out of schools, camps, any organized activity they were a part of. Sex workers were being rounded up by cops as public health criminals and tossed into women's jails. The blood supply got tainted and hemophiliacs became the new untouchables and many people were too scared to recieve life saving transfusions. So 12 year old me decided that joining this fight was how I would prove to my rabbi and my community that I deserved to be called a Jewish adult, a daughter of the commandments.

To this day I don't remember exactly how I heard about the protest or exactly what words I used to convince my mother to take me, but she did. I didn't have the words that young to describe how I felt there at that protest, but now, in my 40's, I do. Vocation. I felt and still feel that G-d was telling me exactly where I needed to be and what I needed to be doing at that point in my life. To be sure, the ACT UP people were surprised to see a 12 year old girl there and perhaps were shocked that her mother had brought her, but I screamed "SILENCE = DEATH" and "STOP KILLING US" and "ACT UP, FIGHT BACK, FIGHT AIDS" with the best of them.

The following weekend my mother brought me to Rhode Island Project Aids and I just said that I wanted to volunteer and do whatever I could to help. Apparently I was the 1st person to go to RIPA (Rhode Island Project Aids) for a religious ceremony mandated community service project. I showed up at 12 and didn't leave till the age of 20 when I joined the Marine Corps. I showed up, I filed paperwork, got coffee, did AIDS buddy work, marched, did fund raisers. When I turned 18 I started going out and dispensing condoms to sex workers, handing them out outside of known hot spots for anonymous sex, gay clubs would contact us to hand them out during closing and I would go, I handed out free, unused needles with the RI needle program. I did anything they asked me to do to fight back against this epidemic. And when I finally got to my duty station at Camp Pendleton I always had mounds of pamphlets and condoms to give out from my barracks room to anyone who needed them. Much to the chagrin of my roommates... it did lead to reputation of being an easy lay on my battalion. But so what?

I think back on those days and I cry because of all the people I knew who aren't here anymore. People I grew to be close to, people I loved, people who watched me grow up. I never regret it though. Not the pain or the tears, because what I did was important and it mattered, just like my old rabbi said. It gave my life direction.

Home of the viking

Ripa/Ribe Vikingecenter, Denmark