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Bringing It All Back Home
Martina Clark has the difficult job of addressing the problem of HIV within UNICEF's own staff.
By Brian Goldman |
Martina Clark tells me that she's become as a rock star. Having just spent the summer working with her on a decidedly unglamorous global HIV/AIDS project at the United Nations Children's Fund, known as UNICEF, I am skeptical that she has suddenly transformed into a pop sensation. I try to imagine this 39-year-old international civil servant as an icon who, like other divas of our time, would probably just go by her first name. "Headlining at Toad's tonight: Martina."
"A rock star?" I ask, doubtfully. "Well, my guitar teacher had all his students play in a little recital, and I sang accompaniments for a bunch of the other students" she responds. I begin to suspect that my skepticism was not unwarranted. "But I can say that I sang in New York."
Although Martina has not in fact topped the billboard charts as she may have hoped, she has become a rock star of sorts within the United Nations. In the eleven months since she began work at UNICEF, she has rocked the bureaucratic boat, successfully pushing her program to the top of the organizational agenda. Martina is charged with addressing UNICEF's and the UN's startling rise in HIV prevalence among its own staff - a problem that the high-up UN diplomats aren't thrilled to acknowledge. "If UNICEF were its own country," she often tells colleagues, "it would be among the top 30 nations in terms of HIV prevalence." Martina attributes this counterintuitive statistic to the fact that staff members often work in high-risk areas of the world, where some become infected on the job though exchanges of blood during car crashes on dangerous roads, for example.
But such accidents cannot account for the full scope of the agency's own mini-epidemic - a scourge so serious that it is beginning to cost UNICEF offices significant portions of their workforces, hindering the organization's ability to aid the neediest children of the world. Over the course of the summer, Martina clued me in to the real problem. UNICEF employs roughly 10,000 staff in 158 countries worldwide, including a mix of national staff, who are from the country in which they work, and international staff, who are stationed abroad as international civil servants. Both categories of staff tend to come from the best-educated sectors of their societies, and as UNICEF employees, they are at least somewhat aware of UNICEF's programs to combat HIV/AIDS among the populations they serve. Yet with that mandate of saving others from HIV/AIDS can come a certain sense of invincibility - the thought that I'm here to save the downtrodden from something that couldn't possibly affect me. The virus, of course, does not strike so discriminately. But what Martina sees sometimes is a tendency to "make dumb decisions at a bar one night while at a duty station, away from their spouse for a long time."
Martina has spent the bulk of her professional life fighting the stigmatization of HIV/AIDS and discrimination against those living with it, both of which contribute to the tragic denial and ignorance displayed by UNICEF staff. Her inspiration has been largely personal: Martina is HIV-positive herself. Despite widespread ignorance, people are usually aware enough not to ask her directly how she became infected with the virus she has lived with for nearly 12 years. "I'm at the lucky end of the bell curve," she tells me near the end of my internship, when we talk casually about her history. "I've never gotten sick, and I've never needed treatment." Over that time, she has seen HIV/AIDS evolve from a virtual death sentence to a chronic condition that still allows for life. "But attitudes haven't changed much over time," she says to me in a tone that betrays her usually cheery demeanor, "and that's really what alarms me the most."
Alarm turns into anger as she tells me of a trip to Botswana, the country most affected by HIV/AIDS in the world. Her meeting with a group of students who were well-versed in the biology of the virus turned sour when they found out she was HIV-positive. They became upset that she was there. "Book-smarts have nothing to do with how you treat other people. If people don't get over their fear, they won't take prevention seriously in their own lives," she laments. "That's what motivates me to do this stuff - we've got so much more to do."
Martina's initial motivation came from a strongly rooted sense of responsibility to HIV-positive women, who were an underrepresented population in AIDS activism during the early years of an epidemic that was largely associated with homosexual males. She began working for the International Community of Women with HIV/AIDS, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that put her in contact with the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, known as UNAIDS. In 1996, UNAIDS hired her as their first openly positive staff member. "I was something between a circus animal and a motivator," she says of her arrival at the agency. "They were mostly setting precedent - putting their money where their mouth is - but I got my foot in the door on behalf of everyone else [living with HIV/AIDS]."
At UNICEF, she sees her role as similarly legitimizing. "What right do we have to tell governments what to do with their countries if we can't even keep our own house in order?" she asks of colleagues while presenting on her HIV/AIDS in the Workplace Programme. In pushing a large bureaucracy to address its own shortcomings and unfortunately embarrassing little secrets, she is sometimes cast as a firebrand - a role she has been well-trained for through previous advocacy experiences, including audiences with President Clinton and the UN General Assembly. She jokes that her recruitment to UNAIDS seven years ago actually had nothing to do with having openly positive staff; it was a strategic move because "as the rep of an NGO, I could cause all the trouble I wanted to, so they had to hire me to shut me up."
As I got to know the UNICEF office environment, it became clear to me that Martina is no ordinary, pencil-pushing UN bureaucrat. The only red tape she ties are loops of red ribbon to promote AIDS awareness. Her rebellion against complacency in the system takes less serious forms too. She refuses to focus exclusively on work when she travels to the field; instead of carrying a laptop, she takes a small travel guitar with her. A rising rock star needs time to practice.
But she has earned this independence through accomplishment. Despite resistance from some sections of the organization to acknowledge UNICEF's problem, and despite the fact that nearly one-quarter of UNICEF offices currently do absolutely nothing to offer HIV/AIDS-related services to their employees, in less than a year Martina has already secured approval for a set of policies that outline how all offices must address this critical situation. She has also completed production of a video on the topic that features staff - ranging from car drivers in Namibia to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan - discussing the need for a discrimination-free workplace that is conducive to containing the disease. And the impact of her successes will not be limited to UNICEF alone. "UNICEF was already leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the UN system, even before I came on board, which is a scary thought," she recounts, "so what I'm doing now will likely be the model for the entire UN later."
Martina displays a cautious pride in her accomplishments at UNICEF and in her decade as an AIDS activist. Still, she remains frustrated. In reference to the plague of discrimination, she says, "It's unbelievable how stupid people can be, even in New York City in 2003. I just cannot comprehend it with the numbers of affected people, the number that have died... it's just so strange, so bizarre. We have to find other ways to attack it."
She dreams of innovating new means to raise awareness and promote a culture of tolerance around HIV/AIDS. "What I'd love to do is to create a CD of women living with HIV - to find a more creative approach to this." Perhaps one day Martina will realize rock stardom after all. And she may do it in the course of combating the discrimination that so hampers controlling this grave threat to international health. She acknowledges that her search for a solution is "my own way of fighting back against the virus. I just decided that I didn't want to sit in the corner and think about dying. It's like I'm trying to stay one step ahead - this ignorance reminds me why I'm here."
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