Locals join HIV/AIDS caravan

In an effort to preserve funding and increase attention to the challenges facing the one million Americans living with HIV/AIDS, three Spokane residents are joining a caravan heading for Capitol Hill.

“It’s time to not be afraid anymore and put a stop to this,” said John Holzendorf.

He and his fiancée joined six people from Seattle and the East Coast on Sunday en route to Washington, D.C., where they plan to ask lawmakers to better fund HIV/AIDS treatment and research.

He has lived with the disease for nearly 10 years, and the combination of drugs that help keep him alive costs upward of $4,000 per month.

As one person said during a group prayer at a vigil at Spokane Community College before they left, “We’re not just dying of AIDS, we’re people living with it.”

Treatments have improved in recent years, and those infected can live sometimes decades after they are infected.

Although some of the stigma attached to the disease has disappeared, AIDS activists say they continue to fight budget cuts to federal and local health programs.

“If they drop Medicaid, they may as well start handing out shovels,” said Charley Fawcett of Spokane, who is also headed to D.C.

The state/federal health care program for the poor pays for more than half of the health care for HIV/AIDS and has been the recent target of federal budget cuts.

Locally, the Spokane AIDS Network’s request for funding this year was turned down amid city budget cuts.

“People are losing services like crazy,” said Adam Cogswell, one of the organizers of the Spokane stop.

The caravan, organized by the Campaign to End AIDS, started in Seattle on Saturday and was scheduled to stop in Coeur d’Alene later Sunday.

It will go through Missoula and Billings, and 16 other cities on the way to Washington, D.C.

Caravans starting in eight other cities will converge at the Capitol in early November.