WESTFIELD – Westfield State Senior Tom Durkee is not afraid of a challenge.
Every day, the communication major from Springfield, who also works as a staff development assistant in the school’s University Residence Hall, seeks to become more proficient in the timeless art of connecting people.
Since the start of the semester, Durkee has taken on a task that several decades ago may have been deemed an exercise in futility: raising awareness about the Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, or HIV/AIDS.
“Kids born in the ’90s, many don’t realize how big of an epidemic it was,” said Durkee. “A lot of students think that you get it and you’ll be OK. Yes, we’ve made many positive developments on the treatment and medication of it, but it’s still a disease, it still takes lives, and it still has no cure.”
Staff development assistants must initiate a campus-wide program over the course of the school year. Durkee began work with the Department of Residential Life at the University at the start of the semester on his week-long program dedicated to raising awareness for the disease.
Following World AIDS Day on December 1, Durkee teamed up with Patricia Berube of the school’s health services office to bring in Tapestry Health, a Springfield-based organization that provided sexually transmitted infection testing for students, the first of a four-day campaign to help students better understand the disease which has killed over 36 million people worldwide since being recognized in 1981 by the Centers for Disease Control.
HIV infects over 35 million people around the world today. The CDC says that around one million people in the United States are living with an HIV infection, but that around sixteen percent are unaware of their condition, which worries Durkee and activists nationwide.
“I do think people are kind of oblivious to it,” he said. “They may think ‘it’s not going to happen to me.'”
To reinforce the dangers of the disease, Durkee arranged for a large segment of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt to be brought to Westfield State for a viewing.
What started in San Francisco in the 1980s as a small project to commemorate the deaths of AIDS victims in the Bay Area has grown into a 48,000 square foot quilt made up of three-by-six foot squares, each memorializing the life of an individual who passed from the disease.
Durkee himself wasn’t sure whether the quilt panels would make it from Washington DC, but he’s glad they did.
“The quilt is a powerful message,” he said. “It’s a statement of too many lives lost because of government ignorance, and this program was to show (that statement).”
Durkee also organized a panel titled “Feeling, Living, and Thriving”, which featured three HIV/AIDS activists, Rob Quinn, Mark Zatyrka, and Westfield State alum Angie Colon-Diodati, who spoke of their experience being HIV positive, a topic that Durkee was initially on edge about.
“I was kind of nervous. It was high risk… ‘how were people going to be affected by their stories,'” he said. “But I was surprised. (Students) asked questions. They delved deeper. Students were really concerned with how they live day to day. They had lots of deep, respectful questions. I was pleased with the response.”
Quinn, who sits on a 30-member advisory board to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health that is made up of HIV positive men and women from around around the Commonwealth, runs a website called OpenlyPoz.com to help support people living with the disease, and was honored when Tom asked him to speak.
“I was very touched,” said Quinn. “I’m always willing to share my story. There’s nothing more powerful than storytelling. It’s good to put a face with HIV.”
When asked of what his personal message was to the students, Quinn stated plainly that the disease is 100 percent preventable, but that everyone needs to be aware of themselves.
“Everyone has an HIV status, whether it’s positive or negative,” he said. “But one in five people don’t know their status. HIV doesn’t discriminate.”
He added that the biggest strength of the panel was in the various ways in which it’s three members contracted the disease: Colon-Diodati at birth, Quinn himself through “high risk behavior” as he put it, and Zatyrka, who contracted it through a hemophila-related blood transfusion.
Zatyrka serves as a board member for the AIDS Foundation of Western Mass. and as Vice President of Marketing for the American Homecare Federation, an organization which provides services for hemophilacs.
“The panel was a perfect mix, as the three of us came from different backgrounds,” he said. “It’s hard to put a face with HIV, but (the panel) went a long way to say that anyone can get it, not just people who ‘deserve to get it.'”
He added that the kids asked good questions and were a “great group to speak to”, but that it’s important to keep getting the information out there.
“Some people see it as curable or that it’s no big deal, but it’s important to tell people the truth about HIV,” he said.
Other events during the week included a drag queen bingo event, where prophylactics were passed out to students with terms associated with AIDS, along with a showing of “Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt”, a documentary about the NAMES Project AIDS quilt released in 1989, on Thursday, which was hosted by Communication Professor Maddie Cahill.
Durkee, who is currently applying to UMass-Amherst and Salem State University for graduate school, stated that the events were held throughout the campus residence halls, and drew 250 to 300 students during the entire week, a turnout that he was excited about.
“For programs within the residence halls, that’s a large turnout,” he said. “We were pleased.”
Berube admired Durkee’s efforts in organizing the entire weeklong initiative.
“Tom coordinated the panel and did such an amazing job,” she said. “He contacted Washington D.C. and got the quilt panels sent up here. The events he coordinated were amazing.”
“I applaud Tom for getting information out to young people,” said Zatyrka, who added that bringing the squares from the quilt went a long way in adding to the overall week.
“After the presentation, people could go see the quilt,” he said. “It was powerful for the students to see that real people died from this disease.”
“Tom deserves some sort of community recognition,” said Quinn. “To begin the day after World AIDS Day and do an entire week of events… I don’t know of any other schools in the area who did anything like this.”
“He has such confidence,” he said. “He’s really a future leader. He’s going to change the world.”
