AIDS work takes woman from South Eugene to South Africa.

Byline: Jeff Wright The Register-Guard

For virtually her entire adult life, 24-year-old Lindsey Reynolds has been obsessed with helping stem the global epidemic of HIV/AIDS.

What keeps her going?

"Noxolo," says Reynolds, referring to the 2-year-old South African orphan that Reynolds befriended this summer after the girl's emaciated mother died of AIDS. The girl, so terrified by her mother's condition that she became afraid of her, had no one to look after her - until an aunt in another province finally was located.

"The numbers are shocking, but it's the individual stories that pull you in and get you hooked," says Reynolds, a 2000 graduate of South Eugene High School. "It's the personal connection you make with that one little kid."

Reynolds wasn't much more than a kid herself when, as a freshman at South Eugene, she immediately got involved in the school's peer education program for HIV.

To this day, she isn't exactly sure what first spurred her to get so involved in HIV prevention - al- though she suspects that the death from AIDS of a friend of her mother's had at least something to do with it.

"All I know is my resume reads nothing but HIV," says Reynolds, the daughter of Helen Towle and Dennis Reynolds of Eugene. "I guess I'm very one-track."

After four years of HIV prevention work in high school, Reynolds enrolled at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., where she wrote her thesis on HIV prevention efforts in a South African province. During her junior year, she won a grant that allowed her to actually travel to South Africa to do research.

It proved to be life-changing.

"I saw people die; I saw the orphan situation," she says. "It was pretty crazy for someone coming out of a sheltered Eugene lifestyle."

The trip was fateful in another way: Another Wesleyan student, Angela Larkan, also received a grant to travel to South Africa for similar research. The two traveled together, visiting an HIV hospice in rural South Africa.

Larkan, a native of South Africa, was equally struck by the heartbreak and misery she saw in her homeland, a country where at least one in five adults is HIV-positive.

As the two students returned to the United States, "We both absolutely decided we had to do something to help," Reynolds says.

The result: The women formed Thembanathi, a nonprofit agency affiliated with Orphans Against AIDS, which supports South African groups that care for orphans and other children made vulnerable by AIDS.

Thembanathi works to empower women by supporting several local income-generating projects in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province. "Thembanathi" is a Zulu word meaning "hope with us."

While in Eugene, Reynolds will give slide show presentations today and Thursday - which is World AIDS Day - on her firsthand perspective of AIDS in Africa. Other local groups, including the HIV Alliance, also plan candlelight vigils Thursday.

Reynolds acknowledges that the fight against AIDS can sometimes feel lonely in the face of widespread indifference.

"When people ask what I've been doing, and I say, `HIV work in Africa,' they often say, `Oh yeah, they've got a lot of that there, huh?' If you tell people the statistics, that's a reality most Americans just can't fathom."

The number of AIDS orphans in South Africa is believed to already exceed 1.1 million. That number could reach 5.7 million by 2015, or more than one in every three South African children.

For her part, Reynolds is hardly giving up. Now a master's student in public health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, she recently returned from her third visit to South Africa, this time to conduct in-depth interviews with women and children touched by AIDS.

There are myriad reasons behind the epidemic, ranging from massive poverty and refugee-producing wars to an extensive system of migrant labor, Reynolds says. But South Africa's traditional patriarchy, leaving women with little power to defend themselves against AIDS, is another reason.

Many families consist of older children raising their siblings because both parents have died, or - as in Noxolo's case - have been taken in by an aunt or grandmother.

Much of Thembanathi's focus is on finding ways for rural women to generate their own income, so as to support themselves and the children in their care. Reynolds on Saturday plans an open house in Eugene where local residents can purchase beaded AIDS pins made by Zulu women.

Her next destination is the African country of Chad, where she plans to do research on reproductive health as part of her master's work. After graduation, Reynolds hopes to be able to devote more time to Thembanathi.

Memories of Noxolo will help keep her on task.

"Every time I go there, one kid at least totally steals my heart," she says.

LINDSEY REYNOLDS

Eugene activist offers slide show presentations on South Africa's HIV epidemic:

Today: 6:30 p.m., Eugene Public Library, 100 W. 10th Ave.

Thursday: 3:30 p.m., International Resource Center, UO campus, sponsored by ASUO Women's Center; 7 p.m., Unitarian Universalist Church in Eugene, 477 E. 40th Ave., sponsored by UU Global AIDS Coalition

Saturday: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., South African beaded artwork open house, 1452 Barber Drive, Eugene

More information: Visit www.thembanathi.org

WORLD AIDS DAY

Additional local events planned Thursday

HIV Alliance: Candlelight memorial observance, 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., downtown Eugene park blocks, Eighth Avenue and Oak Street; remarks by HIV Alliance Executive Director Diane Lang and the Rev. Dennis Parker, music by Eugene Gleemen, reading of names of those lost to AIDS; 342-5088 or www.hivalliance.org.

Zonta Club: Candlelight vigil and rally, 5 p.m., Federal Courthouse, Seventh Avenue and Pearl Street, part of club's Sixteen Days of Activism Against Gender Violence campaign, 343-6511

CAPTION(S):

Lindsey Reynolds, the founder of an organization that helps boost HIV awareness among orphans in South Africa, will talk on the subject in Eugene today and Thursday. Wayne Eastburn / The Register-Guard