On World AIDS Day, Dr. Douglas Smith, a United Methodist man who lives with AIDS, shares about the work of the United Methodist Global AIDS Committee and how all of us can be a loving presence in our communities and congregations for those people living with HIV/AIDS.
Guest: Douglas B. Smith, PhD.
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This episode posted on Dec. 1, 2023.
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Transcript
Prologue
HIV and AIDS aren't in the news much anymore. As the western world has gained access to life-saving medications and cases have decreased. Despite the good news, the worldwide HIV AIDS pandemic still exists with the World Health Organization reporting a startling statistic of those people living with AIDS who don't receive treatment, 95 percent die. On World AIDS Day, Dr. Douglas Smith, a United Methodist man who lives with AIDS shares about the work of the United Methodist Global AIDS Committee and how all of us can be a loving presence in our communities and congregations for those people living with HIV and aids.
Crystal Caviness, host: Doug, welcome to “Get Your Spirit in Shape.”
Douglas Smith, guest: Thank you.
Crystal: Before we get started, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Doug: Yes, I am a Methodist. I was born and raised in the Methodist Church and I'm currently active. I'm an elder, a young 81 years old and have found joy in doing work through the ministries of The Methodist Church.
Crystal: That's awesome. You are such a gift to The United Methodist Church and we're going to talk about that more as the episode evolves. Also, you had a career as a university professor. You have your doctorate in ministry and as you shared with me, you received that when you were 79 and since United Methodist ministers have to retire at age 70, you didn't go through the ordination process.
Doug: That's correct, yeah.
Crystal: But you're using those gifts in different ways and we'll talk about that as well. This episode, Doug, is set to come out on December 1st, which is World AIDS Day. I know that you've been active with the United Methodist Global AIDS Committee that does work throughout the world with HIV and AIDS communities through different initiatives. Let's start with, can you tell me about your involvement with the United Methodist Global AIDS Committee and some of the work that's being done?
Doug: Yes. As I look back over my life, I see points where angels have showed up and one of those was a pastor that I was serving Epworth United Methodist Church where I'm involved and he had been on the Global AIDS Fund as it was called from the start of that initiative, and they were looking for someone who was willing to be on the committee who is living with HIV now, and that happens to be my truth, and so he recommended to the committee that they reach out to me. So I got a call and an invitation and just hit at the right time is when one lives with the pain and the stigma and the reality. To have a chance to act and to do something was amazing. So God spoke through this angel and through that call and it was amazing. The first meeting I went to, of course, they wanted me to introduce myself and I took a set of my pills with me, the HIV meds, and I was able to tell a little about my background and that my life depended upon these pills I had to take them or the virus would kill me, and that's still true today.
And afterwards the members of the committee came up to me with tears and hugs and appreciation, talk about validation and feeling I was in the right place with the right people who were movers and shakers and still are. Bishop Trimble is currently our chair and doing an amazing job in this effort. So it's been a spiritual gift to me, a joy to be able to serve and to give back as I process the reality of living with aids.
Crystal: It sounds like Doug, that it's also a ministry for you.
Doug: Very much. Yes. It's part of my work is doing HIV education in Uganda and Malawi and so on, and some of that has been related directly to the United Methodist Global AIDS Committee, as we call it. Just a bit of background. Originally we were awarding small grants to HIV prevention projects and we reached a point where we realized we and GBGM and Church and Society that it would be more efficient to lump that money together under Abundant Health Initiative in GBGM and Kathy Griffith who was managing those funds and making decisions for the grants is a member of our committee and has been on it for years. So we have a strong connection as an example of the kind of work we do. I was involved with a organization in Malawi Zuzu, and they were looking at the issue of parent to child transmission of HIV and it was common if the wife was HIV positive or in smaller villages for the husband to want to push her out, she couldn't deliver a child.
This is very painful for everybody and our person on the ground there had the idea of working with the local villages and multiple clinics in the area, the shamans as well as people in the villages who had been women who'd been HIV positive had taken the meds so that her baby would be negative and they did joint trainings bringing together all the skills. The women in the villages were trained to be peer counselors as were their husbands who could talk to the men, and this initiative was funded through GBGM and the Abundant Health. It was, I went over for the first training session where I could see all these people come together and these are in villages in places that don't have whiteboards and projectors and all that. We come and sit and actually look at each other. It was amazing to see all those different people there. The project was successful, it got refunded for a second period and the benefit of that training of the people in the villages of the shamans in combination with the clinics, it's just been profound. So it's bringing people together and having them do it themselves is the idea of these projects.
Crystal: Doug, a few years ago I came to an annual conference of I think it was called the Global AIDS Fund at that time, and something that really struck me was the conversations that we were having in the western world about HIV and AIDS are different conversations either being had or need to be had in other parts of the world. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because that was really educational for me to understand that the conversation in the western world is there are drugs now that will keep AIDS keep that kind of at bay and there are just different conversations being had elsewhere.
Doug: Yes. Yeah. So much of it is about education. In parts of Africa where I've gone, there's many, many villages and they're spread out and they don't get the same information that they might in the larger cities and often there's misinformation in Uganda. As you may know, this past year they just passed a law that if you were gay, that's a death sentence, you're killed. Prior to that, when I was working there, it was life imprisonment, so who would want to go and get tested to see if they have HIV? If they were a young gay man, it'd be like walking into the death chamber saying, okay, I'm gay, kill me. It just, it's very difficult in some of those countries and others. It's simply raising the awareness and we have done conferences most recently in Rwanda sponsored by GBGM, our Global AIDS Committee with representatives from our committee being present and I think there was something like 80 participants, Christian leaders and others where the information is being relayed and we did a lot of listening to them and their needs and exchanges to improve it. We've got another conference that's under development now that will be in the Philippines where we have some good connections with some of the Christian leaders there and have been doing similar work. So it really is a matter of education and bringing people together and trying to respect the humanity of everyone.
Crystal: Doug, you mentioned that the church as a whole, there are definitely places where there's been harm done. Yes. So in this work, how important is it that the church be a leader, that the church be visible in the middle of this work?
Doug: It is critically important that we'd be present with, well, truth is all relative, but we'd be present with a message that says you are a beloved child of God. If you are gay, if you are a sex worker, if you are homeless, you are a beloved child of God. That message often doesn't come through or is countered. That's the most important thing in my opinion, and once you're a beloved child of God, then you have the rights and opportunities to be tested to get the meds and so on. One of the things that is unusual in Uganda and many African countries, they create the medications locally and make them available to people free, no cost. My HIV meds for one month, my copay is a hundred dollars. Now, for a lot of people in the states, that's something they couldn't do. There are programs that subsidize that. If people are HIV positive and then at the poverty level and don't know or unaware of those subsidy programs, they can't afford medications. So we go from a country, Uganda is one of those, where those meds are free to ours where they're very expensive.
Crystal: There's a lot of work to still be done. I think because I'm not in that work on a regular basis or maybe even that the HIV/AIDS news, not a lot of it being talked about on a regular basis outside of that community that I think, I think that, oh, everything's good. The people are getting the meds they need, but what I'm hearing you say, there's a lot of work to be done.
Doug: Yes. Yeah. It's become the case here in the United States where people tend to view HIV as being solved. If we look at Covid, we have a vaccine that can pretty much prevent people from getting the disease or if they get it can minimize its effects. After all these years, there are no vaccines for HIV and there are people who are not getting tested and continue to spread the disease. The World Health Organization has looked at setting some guidelines on what we're hoping to accomplish and they call it 90/90/90 meaning 90% of the people will get tested and know their status. 90% of the people will receive the medications and 90% of them will arrive at the level where they cannot pass the disease. It's called undetectable. If that happens, if you're able to get those measures, then you can predict that within so many years, I forgot what it is, maybe five to 10 years from having hit that goal that there will be no more HIV in your country.
So that becomes kind of a scientifically based easy to communicate idea of accomplishment. So some countries are measuring it well, we have 75, 80, 35 or whatever, so we've got to work here. So it's a nice way to give a goal how you eradicate this, and that's where the education comes first. Helping the people to get tested, once tested access to the meds. Once you have the meds, you got to keep taking them. And I can tell you a story about how HIV works for me. There's one point where I was dealing with depression and I just stopped taking my meds for a while. I went in to get tested and I'd gone from being undetectable to having AIDS, so the virus is in my body. If I stop taking it, I will have AIDS and it can kill me. The other thing I just experienced a few months ago, I had a new primary care who's an HIV doctor. He did very extensive tests on me and he showed me there was something like 15 different strains of HIV that had developed in my body and he said, the antiviral you're on now, two of those strains are resistant to it, so I had to change my antivirals. The point is, how many people that are taking the antivirals have a doctor who's well enough informed or would go and have the tests to check the current, strains it to the medication and say, oops, that one's not working for you?
I realized that if I hadn't had that doctor, none of my other HIV doctors had done that. I might be taking the meds, but there was a strain that was growing in my body. So the reality of this disease is painful for those of us living with it and the need for the education and the support.
Crystal: Before we continue our conversation with Doug, let's ponder this question. How often do you wrestle with doubt and how often does it win? In a new book, ”Wrestling With Doubt, Finding Faith,” author Adam Hamilton set out to address that struggle within all of us. Surveying more than a thousand people both inside and outside of the church, he asked questions like, “Do you wrestle with doubt? How often? What are the sources of your doubt when it comes to faith and what is usually the outcome of it?” The book's introduction helps us recognize doubt can and should be a good thing as it leads us to deeper faith. Each chapter is dedicated to one of those classic tough questions that we all ponder over. Is there a God? Is heaven real? Why do my prayers go unanswered? Are non-Christians all going to hell? We seek to shine a light on these and other common queries that cloud our faith. If you've ever found yourself wrestling with doubt in your walk with God, I invite you to pick up the book, spend some time with it and see how it can help you find faith. To purchase or learn more about “Wrestling with doubt, Finding faith,” go to cokesbury.com.
Crystal: How could a local congregation be a part of this work? Doug, where's there a space in their own communities where they can be a part of this work and make an impact?
Doug: Yes. Well, there are several things they can do through us. One is at the General Conference coming up this spring. Most congregations or conferences will have representatives there the day before the conference in Charlotte. We'll have an all day workshop and we'll have information out on this. It's called Breaking Barriers. We've done this pre-conference workshop for as long as I've been on the committee and it's very powerful. We do have people attend from Africa and Rwanda, England, our local people. So it brings people together from all over the world to talk about what's happening in their community, what they need, how we can interact with them, what's the nature of the pandemic there? So that's one thing. In addition, if they make donations to the Advance special that the annual conference receives 25% of that donation of the money that goes into the special for the Advance and they can use that money for AIDS programs to reach out to people. Some of the conferences have done some amazing programs like that. One that it can lift up is the idea of a retreat for people living with HIV and for the families of people with an HIV person in their life, and these retreats have been very successful and they bring people together. They manage it in a respectful way so they can deal with the stigma or the pain people are feeling and have a chance to talk about them in a faith-based setting.
Crystal: You mentioned before we started recording, there's a segment of the population, people who are living in aging with HIV and AIDS and who thought they wouldn't, that the virus would kill them, but yet because of the improvements in medication, they're now aging, but yet they've found themselves in a less than ideal setting.
Doug: Yes, I'm heavily involved in the gay community, being gay myself and happily married to a wonderful man and aging at age 81. I have many friends that I encounter who are isolated as a result of not pursuing their careers when they thought they were going to die in the 1980s and not having any financial savings to help with retirement. So they're living on welfare, isolated and often depressed. Many of the programs that I've been talking about are to prevent HIV being contracted, which is important to end the disease, and there are some programs for those who are elderly, however, they're not as many or as well-known. It breaks my heart. I'm fortunate to not be isolated. I contracted HIV late in life, so I'd already had my career and my retirement, so I'm in a good position compared to some of these that I see. And the need to reach out to those people in your community to find them in your congregation, to create an environment where they can say in a safe space, I have HIV and I'm feeling all alone. To do that for one person in your congregation would be absolutely amazing.
I invite people to both contribute to the work that we're doing globally and that GBGM is doing and you may see other initiatives and to ask your annual conference, where's the 25%? Are you still getting that and what can we do to create some programs from our conference levels? We did surveys where members of the committee called each conference to see who is the person in charge of HIV programs in your conference. And we do have a list of those conferences that do actively have someone, but they're few compared to the number of conferences. So that would be a way to work both within the church, identifying people either in your community or in your congregation, finding ways to reach out to them with respect, making donations to the work and asking your annual conference, what are we doing? How much is coming in from our donations and what could we be doing?
And we've all been through the pandemic. If we think about the death rates and the infection rates of Covid, which many of us have been familiar with. And let me just share from a statement from WHO, it says, based on WHO’s Coronavirus dashboard, there have been over 750 million confirmed Covid cases including 7 million deaths due to Covid. Meanwhile, since the beginning of HIV, there's been almost 85 million cases, 85 million. There were more Covid cases, 750 million. But 85 million HIV cases of those nearly 40 million have died. Covid was 7 million. HIV has been 40 million. 40 million. Do not forget, HIV is not over. A 2020 review mentions that 95% of those with HIV who do not receive treatment die. 95% of you with HIV, and you're not treated die. Covid, one to 4% of those who do not receive treatment died. That's a very powerful way to understand that. HIV is a serious pandemic that we have not stopped, and it's about preventing HIV with the 90/90/90 I mentioned, which leads to an eradication if we can do it, and also addressing the needs of those living with HIV.
Crystal: Doug, you talked about your church in another earlier conversation. I know that you're active in your church and you have a great love for your church.
Can we talk just a minute about how your church has been one that has cared for your needs?
Doug: Yes. I came out late in life and that involved an end of a marriage, a 47-year marriage. It was very difficult and I was really at a loss and I decided to move to the San Francisco Bay area and before I did, I gathered some of my friends who were either a campus chaplain or my pastors, what have you, and said, I need to land in a faith community. I don't know anybody and I'm really at a loss in my life right now. And they referred me to this church. And so I went and met them. I landed there and it was amazing. I'm one who doesn't hide my story from people who can help me. I'm careful of who I tell things to because it can backfire, stigma and other things, but if people can help me, I let them know. And the leadership there, the pastor and the people who embraced me, lifted me up and part of my journey coming out was addiction, and now we call it substance use disorder.
The American Medical Association calls it a disease. So I have substance use disorder and had just come out as a gay man and then contracted HIV. And that community, special people in it knew my story and I worked in the office for a while. I remember the pastor coming and saying, you're my angel, because I'd gotten their database together, as a retired computer scientist, I'd gotten their database together, some other things done. And just to hear those words was so uplifting when I was so deeply depressed with this change. And it was the people, the faith community who were there. When I came in one time, they were laying hands on some people who were traveling and I had had a difficult experience the night before, and I came in and I could just feel God's presence. I could feel like the whole place was vibrating. I put my hand on the end of the chain and it was like, whew! God's energy came through me and I just sat down and started crying. People left the service and I was just sitting in the pew just crying and the pastor came over. Other friends, they didn't ask me why I was crying. They just held space for me.
And when I was in rehab, members of the congregation who knew me, knew my story, came to visit me and support me. And as I met and started to rise out of this deep depression, I met a wonderful man who was a couple of years older than me, and we dated for a short period of time and decided to get married, and we were married in the Epworth United Methodist Church. There were over 250 people there to witness our marriage. The congregation was full, and when they pronounced us spouses for life, the pastor invited any who considered themselves clergy or of the cloth to come up and share in this celebration. And there were seven people who came up on the stage from all different faith denomination. And together they pronounced us spouses for life. We've now been married seven years and just had this joyous event bringing people together to share from the heart.
So faith communities and my faith has kept me alive and given me purpose and direction that has shown up by watching for God's word and being able to discern what do I want to do next and following things that show up and see where it leads me. I would never have imagined when I came over here after divorcing and being so depressed that I would wind up with the Doctor of Ministry doing community development work in Palestine, in Africa, New Jersey, and right here in Berkeley as a person with been to seminary. I would never, if I tried to plan that it wouldn't have happened. But by following the footsteps in the sand, as one beloved pastor said to me, each step has led me to where I am and I feel like I'm in a good place and listening to God. What is the next step? What will show up next? But right now it is beautiful.
Crystal: I thank you for sharing that. And as you were talking, it just reminded me of one of my favorite Bible verses, which is Ephesians 3:20, that God is able to do immeasurably more than you can imagine. And it sounds like that you have experienced that.
Doug: For sure, I have. I have. And I've had the experience of shamanic journeys and interactions with the spirit world, if you will, of being aware of the power of the Spirit and how it presents itself in this world.
Crystal: As we finish our episode today, Doug, is there anything you wanted to talk about specifically as it relates to the work of the United Methodist Global AIDS Committee that we didn't have a chance to share?
Doug: Just encouraging people to watch for those footsteps in the sand that might relate to a passion of theirs, and particularly keeping in mind those suffering from HIV and tuberculosis. Those are big concerns right now in the world, and to look constantly for the good in the world. There's a lot of pain right now, and that needs to be acknowledged, but there's goodness in each of us. So by looking for that goodness and then acting, caring enough to act, and especially as we come to December 1st and World AIDS Day, so remember those you knew or were affected by who have experienced HIV, died from it or other diseases by being one with God and knowing that good will prevails.
Crystal: Those are good words. I'm going to ask you the question we ask all of our guests on “Get Your Spirit in Shape,” Doug, how do you keep your own spirit in shape?
Doug: There's one thing that I was suggested to when I started trying to do it, and that is to be between doings. So often we go from one doing to the next. When this is done, then you're going to go do the next thing, go do the next thing. So the simple act of when I finish this, I may go and walk my dog. I enjoy playing the piano, so I may go and play the piano or sometimes it's just stop and breathe, close my eyes for at least a minute, a minute’s a long time, and then come back. So be between doings is really valuable.
Crystal: Wow, I hear that. And I aspire to be between doings. I'm still working on that. Wow. That's wisdom for sure. Doug, thank you for being a guest on “Get Your Spirit in Shape.” Thank you for the work that you're doing in the church, in the world, the impact that you're making, and I just appreciate you and appreciate all that you do and how you are being in the world.
Doug: Well, thank you. And thank you for lifting up HIV. It's so important that we all are aware.
Epilogue
That was Dr. Douglas Smith discussing the ministry of the United Methodist Global AIDS Committee. To learn more, go to umc.org/podcast and look for this episode where you will find helpful links and a transcript of our conversation. If you have questions or comments, feel free to email me at a special email address just for “Get Your Spirit in Shape” listeners, [email protected]. If you enjoyed today’s episode, we invite you to leave a review on the podcast platform where you listen.
Thank you so much for joining us for “Get Your Spirit in Shape.” I’m Crystal Caviness and I look forward to the next time that we are together.
