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Serving Those Least Served

Jacqui Patterson (SED'90) Fights AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa

When Jacqui Patterson sees people in need, she feels obliged to help, simply because she can. That selfless spirit was evident after Hurricane Katrina, when Patterson (SED'90) volunteered at a disaster recovery center in Texas, and in her ongoing work in Africa combating AIDS.

By most estimates there are easily 40 million people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, with 8,000 dying a day. Between 60 and 75 percent of those victims are in Sub-Saharan Africa. "It's just ravaging Africa," Patterson says. "It's hard to even wrap your head around" the statistics, she adds.

"In Zimbabwe, one of the hardest-hit countries, they're running out of grave sites, so they have to stack the bodies — one will be buried twelve feet down, the next six feet down."

As an HIV/AIDS portfolio manager for Interchurch Medical Assistance (IMA), Patterson, who lives in Maryland, routinely spends up to nine months of the year in Zimbabwe, Tanzania, or Botswana — countries in which poverty is rampant and education is lacking. "There's a lot of myth and mysticism around the transmission of HIV," she says. "So whereas here we kind of buy wholesale that condoms will prevent HIV...there there's a lot of suspicion and a lot more belief in traditional healing than in modern medicine. So that means people aren't really taking precautions like they would here to stave the spread."

Patterson has worked with traditional community leaders and has helped train local pastors and lay volunteers to promote education and prevention. "I've also worked a lot on treatment access," she says, citing her work helping to set up clinics and equip them with antiretroviral therapy resources.

It was in Boston, while studying special education at SED in the 1980s, that Patterson first witnessed the effects of HIV. As a volunteer at the Fort Point Shelter, part of the Pine Street Inn network, she befriended a resident dying of AIDS. "That had a fairly significant impact on me," she says. "It was the sharp, sharp contrast between the liveliest person in the shelter, and then sitting in this darkened room, this emaciated, coughing person who was just a shadow of that vitality that I knew for all those months."

Following graduation, the Chicago native joined the Peace Corps. Her placement preference was Africa or Latin America, "but there was a high rate of [volunteer] attrition in Jamaica," she says, and the Peace Corps figured that someone of Jamaican descent (her father was born and raised there) could tough it out. Patterson trained teachers in special-needs education and set up a deaf-education program. She ended up staying on for a second two-year stint.

After the Peace Corps, Patterson earned master's degrees in social work and public health from the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University, respectively. She went on to work for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, writing a report on children's health insurance in African-American communities, before starting at IMA in 2001. She also sits on the board of directors for several organizations, including United for a Fair Economy, in Boston.

As is often the case with her work in Africa, Patterson found situating evacuees a week after Hurricane Katrina to be "both very depressing and very inspiring." There were "bleak, bleak stories of people who still hadn't connected with their [children] or their brothers or their mothers," but there were also those "who managed to crack jokes and were able to think positively about life in the midst of all that. They're sitting there and the only thing they have is the pen in their hand that they got free from the Red Cross."

Asked what motivates her to slog through often thankless tasks, Patterson answers, "Just wanting to serve the least served — the least served and the most in need."

"It would be easy and fun to do other things," she adds, "but if I can do this, why not do it?" — Patrick L. Kennedy