Agency battles AIDS with education

EDITOR'S NOTE: For a quarter-century, Seattle Post-Intelligencer readers have donated generously to the newspaper's annual Readers Care Fund drive, generating more than $5 million for local charities. Today we look at one of the charities benefiting this year: Rise n' Shine.

Aujzha Vernique Taylor Rose Shaw is a 14-year-old music buff with a taste for fashion. She's going to marry Usher, the chart-topping hip-hop singer, if she ever meets him. Her 7-year-old brother, Nyil Mansur Abdul Muhaymin Damis-Salaam, loves baseball -- Sammy Sosa, to be precise.

Both are in danger.

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Sirens streaming to and from nearby Harborview Medical Center offer frequent reminders of the street violence and drug abuse in their Central District neighborhood. But something else keeps their mother, Andrea Taylor, up at night.

A silent killer already has reached Taylor's family, and the mother now fears for her younger children as they navigate through childhood.

The killer is AIDS. The antidote for her children, Taylor hopes and prays, is Rise n' Shine, a local non-profit organization providing emotional, material and educational support to children affected by the immune-deficiency disease.

Nyil tucks himself into the corner of his mother's living room sofa and peers up at Rise n' Shine program Director Terry Marsh. His sheepishness soon melts into a bright flash of pearly whites, as Marsh breaks the ice with lighthearted conversation.

"I just made the student council -- principal's choice," sister Aujzha pipes in, never needing a second invitation to speak.

Aujzha plops down beside her brother, resting her feet on the coffee table next to the latest issue of Essence magazine -- a publication supporting efforts to combat AIDS among black women.


		Jim Bryant / P-I
	Andrea Taylor, left, watches daughter Aujzha, right, draw during a game of Pictionary at the Rise n' Shine Christmas party. In the back is Janie the Clown and Rashard Jenkins, right.

Steps away, behind a closed bedroom door, a 22-year-old talented woman sleeps away the late afternoon hours beyond the scope of such prevention campaigns. Taylor's older daughter, who has HIV, embodies the primary reason for Rise n' Shine's existence.

The 17-year-old organization is in this community, and in this home, to block a cyclical problem and its accompanying costs.

"We have to get beyond the myths," Marsh said. "In order for these kids to stay above being at risk, they have to learn that every action has consequences."

It is well-known that AIDS has been the No. 1 killer of black people aged 24 to 44. And although blacks comprised just 12 percent of the nation's population in 2002, they accounted for half of the nation's AIDS diagnoses during that year, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Black children represented 65 percent of all reported pediatric AIDS cases in 2000, according to the National Medical Association.

When such numbers hit Taylor's home three years ago through her teenager's misguided quest for pregnancy, she promptly moved her family from Nashville back to her childhood home of Seattle -- back to the comfort of familiar streets and lifelong friends, and back to a city with a program she considers vital to the health of her younger children.

Rise n' Shine has since gone to work. Summer camps, support groups and seasonal events form the outline of the organization's interaction with Aujzha and Nyil. Mentoring relationships, "dream casting" and frank educational discussions about risky behavior are the meat on the program's bones.

"I want to be an outer space guy, a policeman and a bouquet maker," says Nyil, whose name means "earner," as he twirls his slender frame on the living room floor.

"You may have a chance to be all those things," Marsh says.

Aujzha has already begun having visions of adulthood.

"I love to write," she says. "Ever since the fifth grade, that's when I started."

She has submitted poetry to the Panther Print, her school's student publication, and hopes to soon treat commuters to a small portion of her verse as part of Metro's Poetry on the Buses program. But such successes and dreams are fragile. Aujzha's run through the gantlet of adolescence is already under way.

"She's having things thrown at her all the time, from older men in their 20s," Taylor said.

Aujzha is unimpressed with the advances of older men. She's seen what one bad choice can produce. She sees it everyday, as her sister fights for life under the weight of an incurable illness.

For many of Aujzha's friends, the numeric realities are more difficult to believe.

She continually reminds her classmates of just how dramatic the threat of unprotected sex really is.

"Boys don't listen to me, but girls, they'll sit down and listen -- some of the time," she said.

Such is Rise n' Shine's mission -- to make sure the only thing kids such as Aujzha and Nyil ever spread is life-saving information, and, in Aujzha's case, some stylish prose, too.

"My friends say I dance to music that's not there," she wrote in a recent poem. "But when you love to dance like I do, it's nothing."

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