MEET Joan Stephens. Dressed in a sunshine yellow top, she’s a picture of beauty, confidence and youthful radiance.

Her neatly coiffed hair, eyelash extensions, nose ring and her bright smile, tell of a stylish woman with a bubbly, animated personality.

You’d never guess she is nearly 50 years old, and the mother of seven. You also wouldn’t guess that she has HIV, the deadly virus that causes AIDS.

In fact, she has been living with it for 11 years now, and through the ministries of health and of labour, has become part of a team of HIV/AIDS activists working to sensitise the Jamaican workforce and the wider population about the illness.

“I acquired it from my husband. I was diagnosed in January 2000,” she told the Sunday Observer in a candid interview last week.

The marriage, Stephens says, was fraught with infidelity and lasted less than three years.

“About a month into the marriage he started getting fat. He looked so different, he was just putting on a lot of weight. Then, afterwards, he just started losing weight and we kept asking how come he was getting so skinny and he said he didn’t know.

“He had this cough and each time he coughed he threw up and we were wondering why he had the cold so long. And it was on his dying bed he confessed to his mother that he had an affair with this lady from abroad and that’s how he got it. He met the lady before he met me.

“I said, ‘why didn’t you tell me? At least I would have known what to do then!’

“But I think what keeps me going is that I found out he was cheating a lot, so I said ‘listen, husband or no husband, you’re not having no form of unprotected sex with me’, so that’s why I think my body didn’t keep getting reinfected,” she says.

Since then, Stephens has gone through the expected emotional phases of shock, denial, anger, bitterness, forgiveness and acceptance. She has experienced discrimination in her Seaview Gardens community, at church, the church-school her son attended, and among her in-laws. She has been the subject of gossip and rumours at work.

She says the situation used to depress her and she admits to “crying for months” and to not getting past the anger and bitterness for “about two to three years”.

These days however, she has forgiven her husband, who succumbed to the illness eight years ago. She focuses on taking her medication as prescribed, eating well and keeping a positive outlook on life to ensure she doesn’t develop AIDS.

Her viral load has been undetectable since last year, which means her HIV tests are now showing no sign of the antibodies to the virus.

“But that don’t mean I can stop taking the medication,” she says, pointing out that doing so will make her vulnerable to opportunistic illnesses such as colds and the flu.

Save for a six-month period last year where she had a strange illness which caused her to sleepwalk, yet made her unable to walk under normal circumstances, or talk or write properly, Stephens says she has never been ill.

“I never have a cold for more than three days. I never reach the stage where I have vomiting, diarrhoea or sores. My skin is always as you see it, just like this,” she says, extending her hands to reveal unblemished skin save for a tattoo on the upper left arm.

“So you wouldn’t know my status unless I disclose it to you.”

So what’s the secret to looking so good when you’re 50, have had seven children and live with a deadly virus?

“I don’t have no secret. It’s a gift from God. Once you have positive thinking… A gentleman once told me that if you think negatively, the blood that flows through you is not going to be full of no energy or no vibes. You have to have positive thinking for your blood to flow the right and proper way.

“I don’t say we don’t have ups and downs in life, which we all do, but I just don’t let them get to me. I might be down now, but in another five, 10 minutes, I’m back up again. I try to find something at all times to make me smile,” she says, with a flash of her pearly whites.

“I just put it aside and just move on with my life. It’s not easy, but you have to take it one step at a time,” she says.

But Stephens wasn’t always this calm and composed. There was a time when she wasn’t able to talk about her situation without breaking down. Now, the story gushes forth freely.

She talks about the moment she first learned of her HIV-positive status. She had applied to the Canadian hotel programme offered through the Ministry of Labour, and was awaiting the decision when the programme managers called her in to re-do the required blood test. She did it three more times after that.

“I kept asking myself why I was doing the test so often. I wasn’t thinking of HIV at all. I thought I had cervical cancer because whenever I had sex I used to bleed a lot so that’s how the virus entered,” she discloses.

“When I first found out, I was frozen for the first 15 minutes. I looked at that thing [the letter confirming her positive status] so many times. I just sat there staring, staring and that’s when I said ‘something has to take you out of this world, if it’s not one thing it’s another’. But I didn’t break down. On the way home I didn’t think about it at all, until when I reach home and sat down in the chair, put my feet up on the wall and the tears just started flowing.

“Then, if my skin itch me, if my hair feel funny, I say, ‘Yes, I’m going to die'”

Fortunately for her, Stephens said her entire family has been supportive. Initially, her children, who range in age from 15 to 33, were apprehensive about her being an HIV/AIDS activist, but not anymore.

“I told everybody, my mom, my dad, my kids. I thank my family for their support because they didn’t push me aside. My kids never cried, they never put me down. I don’t get negativity from my family or my kids. My son in Afghanistan calls me everyday. ‘Mommy are you alright? Do you need money?’ That’s the kind of support I get. My dad is in England, he knows about it but he doesn’t talk about. He’s one of those people who push things to the back of their mind. My mom is in New York, she calls me practically every day,”

Her husband’s family, on the other hand, was not so kind,

“His family had it that I gave it to him. They discriminated against me, they put me down, they classed me, they did the worst things,” she says of her in-laws.

The couple had one child together, a boy who is now 15 years-old and HIV-negative.

“When they told me my son was negative I said, ‘Thank you Father!'”

“When he was born he weighed eight pounds, but when he started to grow he had no weight, he was very skinny, but I wasn’t thinking about HIV. Is since this happen to me that I start to reflect. He didn’t start to get fat until he was 10.

“My husband had started to act certain way towards me after the baby born. He wasn’t giving me any money, so I said I wasn’t going to breastfeed any baby on hungry stomach,” she tells the Sunday Observer.

That, ironically, could have been the baby’s saving grace, since HIV can be passed from an infected mother to her child through breast milk.

One challenging moment came when the church-run basic school her son was attending tried to kick the child out when it was discovered that she was infected with HIV.

“When he (her husband) first got ill, he asked me to accompany him to church. From pastor see him pastor know what wrong with him because is the same pastor that got us married.

“He said, ‘I know your husband is HIV [positive], are you?'” I said yes, and then the discrimination started because my son was attending the same school and they didn’t want him to continue at that school.

“But I didn’t take him out. I told them he was staying until he was ready to go to primary school,” she says, stressing that people with HIV deserve to be treated as human beings like anybody else.

Another very challenging time came when rumours about her status started swirling at her workplace, but instead of rolling over and playing dead, Stephens took the bull by the horns and decided to confront her colleagues.

“I don’t look worse than anybody else. When I stand up in front of them I said, ‘Do any of you know what an HIV person looks like? Or ‘Do you know what HIV is?’ They said no.

“I said, ‘Have you ever seen an AIDS victim?’ They said said no. I said, ‘Do I look like I have AIDS?’ ‘Cause I know I don’t reach that stage and I will never, ever reach that stage (because) it’s in the mind,” she says.

The rumours and the discrimination both at her workplace — where she is a merchandiser — and in her community have died down, she says, but even if others persist, it doesn’t bother her.

“…If it even going on it don’t even matter to me. I don’t mind if I go out ah road and people say yes, she HIV. Me know my status, you know yours?” she asks rhetorically.

“To me it’s a mindset. If you tell yourself you want to acquire a house in the next 15 to 20 years depending on how you stay, don’t you work towards that? Well, that is what I tell myself. I tell myself I know it’s a sickness, but based on how you deal with it, it’s gonna take you to another level. I’m not going to let it take me to that level. My level is to continue to live and show people that irrespective of what happens to you, you can live. Try to think positive at all times, never try put down yourself, because the moment you put down yourself, to me, you’re dead,” she says, the strong will in her demeanour hard to miss.

That’s one of the reasons she decided to take on advocacy work, to help persons living with HIV like herself to realise that they can lead full lives after contracting the virus.

“You have to be in the position like me to reach out to me in the same situation… I can relate to somebody in the same situation as I am as a form of comfort to them, and I feel within myself that probably this happen to me for a reason; everything in life is for a reason. I know I can reach out to others who are in the same situation as I am to let them know that it’s not the end of the world,” she says.

But there is more to be done to address the physical needs of the stricken, especially where nutrition is concerned, the woman says. Anti-retroviral drugs can now be had free of cost in several government-run clinics and pharmacies, but her concern is about those who cannot afford to eat properly while on the medication.

“I can always say it’s easy, but what about those who don’t have a job and don’t have money to buy food? I think they need to have a programme where people who are unable to sustain themselves in a certain way can get food to eat, because taking the pills and not eating is not going to work,” Stephens says, giving an example of an unemployed friend who she says succumbed to his illness as a result of poor eating habits.

As for her sex life, Stephens confesses that she is sexually active, but hastens to add that she discloses her status before engaging in the act and that she never goes without a condom.

“Yes, I am but I use condoms. No condom, no sex. I’m not running no risk infecting anybody, which I know I won’t, but I don’t want anybody reinfecting me either. ‘Cause as I said, the truth is not written on anybody’s face.”