Two Years of Wonder - A Memoir

Chapter 14: Alexis

Alexis has just started school at one of the public schools. These were the schools that rejected the kids from Rainbow because of their HIV status. It took a supreme court case to get them to allow our children in, but discrimination remains.

Alexis is fourteen. She is pugnacious and forthright. The boys of the orphanage will testify to her being a tomboy and very competitive in soccer. Bottom line: Alexis is tough. She is from Cottage Yellow and many volunteers assume she is the one who taught Miriam her strictness (I'm not so sure, I think Miriam is a tough disciplinarian at heart, but I digress). Alexis is one of the big-girls of the house and she is often put in charge of the younger children, however, at times her tough mask slips. On a retreat with the teenage girls, I remember my sense of shock when she came up to me at the breakfast table holding her antiretrovirals in one hand, a glass of water in the other, her brow furrowed, her eyes wide with worry.

"I can't take them with water so early," she said.

"Why not?"

She twisted her mouth into a frown, darted her eyes side to side and said in a soft voice, "I'll throw up."

It's a rare show of vulnerability from her and I can read in her reluctance that the admission is against her nature. But stuck with me for the duration of the retreat, her hand is forced.

"No problem," I say, making as little show of it as possible. I was eager to be her co-conspirator, preserving the tough exterior she prided herself on. I realized it protected her from the world, a world that—she later tells me—she felt rejected her from birth and really never stopped.

Alexis is a total orphan. No one knows where she came from or who her extended family might be. As the orphanage begins to focus more on re-integration, sending the children to stay with family on the holidays, Alexis and a handful of others have nowhere to go and often go home with staff members.

It's Alexis who at her new school feels the full brunt of discrimination. When she goes to join the boys in a soccer game at lunch, they stop the game and pull the ball away from her. They tell Alexis that girls can't play. As if she were at the orphanage, she argues with these boys, insisting that she can and that she is likely better than their best player. Then the real reason comes out.

"We don't want to play with someone who has AIDS," one boy says, his words hitting her like a fist. The taunting snowballs from there, the most painful of many phrases hurled at her: "You won't even be alive. You won't even be here in a few weeks."

That's the barb that cuts the deepest and stings the most. Alexis, so fierce in other circumstances, is defeated.

She is quiet around the cottage for days after that. Stubborn and independent, she does not disclose what happened or how she feels about it to anyone, although from the way she is short with the younger kids, hitting and punching them when she loses her temper, it's clear she is not herself.

She does not seek out any grownups for guidance and instead counsels herself. Days, weeks pass. She prays, at first for the boys to be punished, then for strength. Time does not make the hurt less but time provides another revelation that she would share with me later.

"I realized I was still here. I wasn't dead. I was taking my medicine and I was fine."

The revelation reignites the fight in her. She seeks out the same cadre of boys at school, stands among them in the middle of their soccer game and says, "By the way, I am still here." It becomes her mantra. Getting off the school bus each morning she bounds over to the boys to greet them with the same phrase.

"I am still here." Whether she sees them passing on the stairs, "I am still here," the hallway, "I am still here," the classroom, "I am still here," the library, "I am still here," the head mistress' office, the school clinic, the bathrooms, she repeats, "I am still here."

Over time Alexis is herself again. I find it a shame that sometimes the children have to take it upon themselves to change hearts and minds, to counter discrimination and stigma, but unfortunately it's the unfair burden of an unjust disease.

But in the end Alexis wins. (She always does.) She is one of the few girls that now plays soccer with the boys.

And she is better than most.