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This Months Issue
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Sex in a dangerous time
A school concert gave Joeli Cati and his girlfriend an opportunity to get together and the chance to experiment with alcohol and sex. They never met again after high school but eleven months ago, 19 year old Joeli was diagnosed with HIV.
By LICE MOVONO He had big dreams and plans for a career that would take him out of his village home. He was going to help his family have a better life - the dream of a typical young man. He had a girlfriend; she was one of the best looking at his school. They had been dating for a year and thought they knew each other well enough. It was time to take their young love to the next level. It was time to have sex. By the time Joeli was 19 years old, he had developed an active sex life, a steady girlfriend – and HIV, the virus that causes Aids. When he bade his young love goodbye at the end of the sixth form school year while a student at Suva Sangam Secondary School, Joeli looked forward to moving on to adulthood. The Namara native had no reason to worry about his love life or his future until he was well into his second year of the sixth form at Suva Grammar School the following year. “When we said goodbye at the end of school the year before, we both said goodbye knowing we would be spending the festive season away from each other and would meet again the following year,” he said. “But we never met again.” The young lovers had planned to meet at the Fiji Institute of Technology in 2005 for the first year of tertiary studies. It was not to be because not only did Joeli decide to take a different path towards tertiary studies, he also didn’t think too much of the absence of his first love. “I just thought I was lucky to have met and been in love with such a beautiful girl. I never even thought I would be able to catch a girl like her. When we lost touch, I just put it off as one of those things.” Two years and several kilograms of weight loss later, Joeli was in and out of hospital with rashes that wouldn’t go away, boils that could not subside and a situation that now forced him to wonder about the fate of his lover. Theirs is a story that Joeli said would be all too familiar for today’s teens – boy meets girl, girl asks out boy and plans are made for a drinking session. For Joeli and the girl we will call Jane[1], it was the school concert that gave them an opportunity to get together and a chance to experiment with alcohol and sex. “We all performed at our school concert (Suva Sangam) and afterwards we went out to a nightclub where we partied and drank all night,” Joeli says, recalling his first night with Jane. He didn’t have any illusions about his partner’s virginity but Joeli said he was quite surprised to realise that a motel room had been arranged and paid for prior to the night of the concert. Two other girls and a guy made up the rest of the after-concert party. There was some drinking, some dancing and consequently, some sex. For an entire year of doing sixth form again at Suva Grammar School, Joeli had no reason to worry. Until the fevers started. “I had high fevers and could never really figure out why. Then I started to lose a lot of weight and that was when the jokes began.” Relatives that Joeli were staying with at the time would joke about the possible causes for Joeli’s continued illness. At the top of the list was the dreaded “kalou ni draki”, what is believed to be an un-diagnosable illness as a result of witchcraft. One of the symptoms of this “disease” is quick weight loss so when Joeli went through this, his relatives were quick to suggest traditional and religious healing. For the better half of a year, Joeli’s relatives wondered what was causing the then 20-year-old to be sickly all the time. When a trip to a well-known priest didn’t incur the results that Joeli had hoped for, his relatives started to gently suggest that he take some medical tests. Still full of life and dreams of building a career after completing secondary education, Joeli always saw his relative’s jibes as just that - a big joke. “At the time I was so terrified and just would not entertain the thought that I could possibly have HIV. However, I changed for the worse the very night I returned from being prayed over and that’s when I started to reflect on myself.” A visit to the Valelevu Health Centre a few days later was Joeli’s first ever introduction to the disease. He had never had any sex education let alone any awareness of the virus that causes AIDS, prior to his visit. “The doctor at the health centre was very helpful and gave me a lot of information about the disease but most of what he told me led me to believe that it was at the very least another strong possibility.” With the information also came a sense of fear and this kept the boy from finding out his status for at least another six months. Half a year of boils that didn’t respond to antibiotics passed before returned to the health centre and this time he got some penicillin and stronger advice to get tested. “I still would not admit to myself that I could be HIV positive but an aunt of mine, who is a teacher, came home and dragged me to the Private Hospital for skin treatment because by then the boils and rashes were just so bad.” He was referred to and admitted at the PJ Twomey Hospital where after two weeks on more anti-biotics did nothing so Joeli finally agreed to take a test. Two weeks later his doctor asked for further tests. “Then an evening in February 2007, my doctor took me aside at dinner and asked that I give him some time later that evening for a chat.” “He came to my room and gave me the bad news. I was indeed HIV positive.” “I cried and didn’t hear any more of the words that came out of his mouth. That night, I tossed and turned in bed with images of my parents in my mind as I worried about their reactions and actions.” As far as reactions go, Joeli is one of the lucky ones. His parents, though broken at first, have been accepting and supportive. One of the first things Joeli’s father did when he learnt of his son’s predicament, was to take yaqona to the district chief to ask for “forgiveness” and support. “Not forgiveness that I had contracted the disease, but we realised that the vanua should not have learnt through the media the way they eventually did, but rather from us – me or my family.” “The chief’s response was to say that nothing would change in the way I would be treated. In fact, if anything the love that my relatives and fellow villagers have for me has doubled since they learnt of my status.” So far, Joeli has not met with any ill treatment but he is still a little boy lost. He is definitely not the first to come public with his status but he is definitely among the youngest, something which makes his story an important one to tell. Joeli’s life now is a dream: he volunteers at the Fiji Network for Positive People (FJN+) where has access to counselling, income-generation training and also the friendship of others like him, who understand the life of someone who has been dealt with a stigmatic disease. Although his situation is relatively positive (forgive the pun) and he lives a somewhat comfortable life, his eyes tell a different story. While at first one can be mistaken for thinking Joeli is happy-go-lucky with an easy-going personality, a deeper conversation might give you an insight into what it is like to be barely out of teens and already knowing your fate. To understand a little bit of what Joeli is going through, try to imagine that you are just starting to learn what it means to live when you suddenly confronted with your own mortality. It’s not an easy feeling to comprehend. “I was absolutely terrified and even my family didn’t expect me to live past Christmas (2007),” Joeli said. “But the day I walked into the offices of FJN+ I saw in the eyes of other positive people there, the same look that I had carried with me since finding out I was HIV positive. I knew then that I was not alone.” After some training and awareness-raising programmes, Joeli also realised that there might be others just like him: youthful, free-willed teenagers messing around with something they did not know much about. To ease his own pain and also for want of something useful to do, Joeli decided that he needed to come out public so other teenagers would realise that HIV could happen to them. But more important to Joeli is his quest to let every student, teacher, parent and education administrator know that sex education and HIV-awareness programmes needed to start in schools. The entire time Joeli was at Suva Sangam and again at Suva Grammar School, he never learnt anything about sex from inside his classroom. “What I knew was what I learnt from my friends and you know, the usual places!” In fact, his first proper introduction to HIV and AIDS was with the doctor at Valelevu Health Centre when he started looking for answers to his illness. Joeli didn’t want the names of the schools he attended to be mentioned for fear of ruining the reputation of both institutions. “But think about it, if big schools like these two prominent Suva schools have students who don’t know enough about sex and about HIV, what about students in more conservative schools? What about students in the villages? Where are they learning about this disease?” Joeli does not feel his life is over and he asks that people who view people living with HIV and AIDS with disdain to stop and think about the illness another way. “We will all die someday. This is just another disease that can kill you or me! The only reason we fear it is that it is new and it is transmitted by sex. “If we continue to fear it, then we will not talk about it and we will not ask about it and we continue to not know enough to stop the spread of it.” It’s too dangerous to have sex, is one of the messages Joeli gives people as he goes on outreach programmes as part of his work at FJN+. He told Mai Life that young people needed to stop being so carefree with their lives. “Too dangerous to throw caution to the wind and not worry about whether you are doing it safely. Too deadly to have fun without thinking of what comes after that. I know because I was just having fun too and I didn’t even know enough about that fun!” Joeli said it’s important that students and youths engaging in sex realise what can happen to them if they don’t have safe sex. It’s common for students to find humour in the idea of an HIV-awareness programme. In fact, most young people will laugh off the idea that they too can get AIDS, Joeli says. “When we are young, we think we will live together and we don’t imagine that AIDS can happen to us. Well it can. I should know!” Joeli reckons that our Pacific island nature and communal living habits can work against the spread of HIV and AIDS in the region. “We are a nation of people who love to talk! We love to gossip, it’s in our nature as Pacific islanders. Let’s gossip about this disease. Don’t gossip about people who have it. Instead use us to educate young people so you don’t have to go through this too!” 
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