Yinka Jegede-Ekpe, sees her life as a series of battles, but her story follows a familiar pattern: She runs into huge obstacles, she wages tough fights, and she emerges unscathed -- mostly.
Jegede-Ekpe is HIV positive. But her fights aren't always against the human immunodeficiency virus. Her adversaries are almost always people.
Just as HIV-positive Americans were met with widespread rejection and fear in the early to mid-1980s -- many are still experiencing it to this day -- Jegede-Ekpe, 25, has faced scorn, panic, bullying, and anxiety in Nigeria ever since she learned of her infection six years ago.
For her decisions to declare her status publicly, to educate Nigerians, and to advocate for the rights of those living with HIV and AIDS in Nigeria, Jegede-Ekpe was named one of four 2004 Reebok Human Rights Award recipients on Monday at the UN. Yesterday afternoon she was to talk about her challenges in the Snyder Auditorium at the Harvard School of Public Health, which is overseeing a US$25 million AIDS treatment and prevention program in Nigeria.
Jegede-Ekpe has much to say about what it is to live with HIV in Africa today, the epicenter of the global pandemic. It begins with the moment she found out she was infected. She was 19, living in the southwestern Nigerian city of Ilesha, north of Lagos, and she had rashes all over her body. She took a blood test.
"The lab scientist started looking at me like I was someone from another world, an outcast," she said one day recently. "I found out I was positive. I couldn't believe it. I thought I was practicing safe sex. My thought was, I was going to die immediately. The first, second, third day passed, and I didn't die. So I got myself out of bed, and I called my boyfriend, a medical student."
She couldn't contain her anger. "My mind was such that I was going to kill him; he infected me. I told him he must go for a test, and he did."
Jegede-Ekpe paused. "It came out negative."
She thought about other potential exposures. She had not had sex with anyone else. Then she remembered a tooth extraction. She visited the dentist, took a look at the unsanitary conditions and knew that someone else's infected blood had been passed to her during the procedure. The dentist, shaken by the news, immediately started sterilizing his equipment.
People started hearing about her diagnosis. Fellow choir members at her church asked that she no longer sing with them; she decided to leave the church. At the Wesley Nursing School, where she was studying to be a nurse, the head of the school told her she should drop out.
Jegede-Ekpe stood firm.
In her meeting with the administrator, he said, "What is your future if you are HIV positive?"
"My future is in the hand of God, not in the hands of you," she responded.
"There's no future in nursing for you," he said.
"I'm not going to leave," Jegede-Ekpe said.
And she didn't. The school made it difficult for her to stay. The administration put a lock on the women's bathroom and refused to give her a key. Most of her classmates wouldn't associate with her. Lecturers, she said, "looked at me as though I was a ghost. They thought I would die before five years. It is surprising to them I am alive now."
In 2001, she graduated with her nursing degree. At the time, she had another decision to make: going public with her status.
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