85 Broads fights AIDS in Kenya

Four students screened a documentary and hosted a silent auction Thursday to benefit an AIDS clinic they are helping to found in the small town of Lwala in western Kenya.

Monique Yashaya '09, Danielle Snyder (Vanderbilt '07), Alexa von Toebel (Harvard '06) and Kaavya Viswanathan (Harvard '08) made the documentary, "Lwala," as interns with the women's career network 85 Broads. When they were asked to use film to address an issue about which they felt strongly, they chose AIDS and traveled to Kenya.

"When making the documentary, we really wanted to make something that would resonate with people of our generation," Yashaya said.

Though they started with a tour of the country, the film project and the eventual idea for a clinic didn't fully unfold until they reached Lwala, a town in the western province of Nyanza.

"Lwala is where we first got hit by things." Yashaya said. "In Nairobi, it's a cosmopolitan city, it's very Western if you want it to be, but just on the outskirts is Kibara, the biggest slum in sub-Saharan Africa. In Lwala there's no stratification like that. We really had to deal with how the world lives."

While conducting interviews in Lwala, the four met a 20-year-old young man who moved them with his explanation of why he had never been tested for HIV. Despite being in high-risk situations, he said he simply couldn't afford to get tested, and the stigma of infection prevents AIDS education in the village.

"We immediately decided to get everyone tested who wanted to be tested there," Yashaya said. "They literally started celebrating and chanting. They knew it was a problem, [but] they just didn't know how to deal with it."

The students managed to get 60 people tested that very afternoon at the Pona Clinic in the nearby city of Rongo. By the time they left Kenya, that number had grown to 128 people, and it has now reached 550.

They now hope to raise enough money to help two Vanderbilt medical school students, brothers Milton Oludhe Ochieng' and Frederick Otieno Ochieng', open a small clinic in Lwala itself. Such a clinic would make it possible for many more villagers to get tested and to get help if they should need it.

"We're about $35,000 short of it being operational, but I think we raised a solid part of that over this past week. It was really great that a lot of Princeton students showed up to support this endeavor," Yashaya said.

Though the total amount raised in the auction has not yet been totaled, 250 people attended the event, which was held at the Asia Society in New York. In the meantime, the four students hope to screen the documentary at their respective colleges and raise awareness about the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

"There's no time to wait with an issue like this," Yashaya said. "It's something that needs to be in the vernacular now to make any kind of difference in the future."