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While a postgraduate student at both Columbia and New York universities, Maria Crocitto Carpi studied hard and worked three jobs. But when Saturday night rolled around, the bubbly blonde laced up her sneakers, grabbed some garbage bags, hiked to the local bakery on the Upper West Side and, just before closing, demanded all the bread they had left. Even in her “early days,” when she spent her weekends volunteering at homeless shelters, the now-mother of two felt “a tremendous pull to helping beyond ourselves.” The first Connecticut resident to participate in the annual AIDS Walk to benefit the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, the New Canaanite recently returned from a week in the United Republic of Tanzania. Elizabeth Glaser lost her daughter and eventually her own life to AIDS due to an infected blood transfusion, at a time when few if any AIDS-related drugs were geared toward children. She co-founded the organization in 1988 to prevent HIV infection in children and eliminate pediatric AIDS. When Ms. Crocitto heard about the fourth annual AIDS Walk, she was once again wrestling a full schedule — mother, soccer coach, CCD teacher, CEO of her own company, and member of the Desmoid Tumor Research Foundation Board of Directors — and felt it wasn’t in the cards. “Oh my goodness, I’m so swamped, so busy, I’m in the middle of so much,” she described her first reaction. “It’s too bad that I can’t go.” But, recalling a story she wrote years prior about pediatric AIDS, the founder of the medical education company Advantage Communications — probably to no one’s surprise but her own — decided to hop on a plane March 11, and lend a hand in what she believes is a “global responsibility.”
AIDS in Africa AIDS has killed 25 million people since its recognition in 1981, according to UNAIDS: The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. Almost 39 million people were living with — or dying of — the virus in 2005, more than 63 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Globally, nearly 1,800 children under age 15 become infected every day, according to UNICEF, and 1,400 die daily of AIDS-related illnesses — the majority from the poorest regions of sub-Saharan Africa. But what makes this story even more tragic, according to Ms. Crocitto, is that they are “dying of a preventable disease.” “In (New Canaan) we’re all so involved with charity work, looking for discoveries and looking for developmental medicines that can fix things like cancer,” she said. “But here we have an opportunity where we actually have the drugs ... we just need to educate the communities on how to actually use them.” The obstacles to healing Tanzania and the rest of the sub-Saharan region are both cultural and physical. Treatments are available that significantly decrease the chances a baby born to an HIV-positive parent will contract the virus, Ms. Crocitto said. The problem is they must be administered within 72 hours of birth. Easier said than done, is an understatement.
It’s a “tough terrain,” Ms. Crocitto explained, and clinics can be far from many towns. “Great efforts are being made,” she added, “but just by the simple fact that a mother who has just given birth can’t walk 10 miles down to the nearest clinic to get a drug that’s readily available ... that’s a death sentence right there for the child.” It is easy to hear this an ocean away and ask, “Why not just rent a bus?”, but according to Ms. Crocitto, “it’s not so easy there.” “You can’t just walk into a place and treat the babies because the mother is still infected,” she said. “And then you have to treat the parents because the spouse is still infected. It’s a vicious cycle.” Access is the key, but in addition to terrain, cultural values often create barricades to survival. Getting a male spouse to a clinic is “very hard,” she said, African mothers ordinarily breast feed for the first two years, and resistance to contraceptive prevention is “a problem.” Only 23 percent of married women in sub-Saharan Africa used contraceptives in 2000, according to UNICEF, as opposed to 48 to 84 percent in the rest of the world. “The prevention has to happen 24 hours a day,” Ms. Crocitto said. “The infection is spreading 24 hours a day, and so the goal is to really infiltrate life in the community through schools, through clinics, and through businesses as well ... . And it’s doable because it can be treated.”
Maria’s Mission During her six days in the Arusha-Moshi area of Tanzania, Maria Crocitto walked about 20 miles a day. Along the way, she visited hospitals and orphanages, helped build schools, and soaked up stories of perseverance, defiance and undying love. She met Carol DiPaolo, who went to Mexico to buy black market drugs to save her son, Joey, a 1980s AIDS “poster boy” who now speaks to the public about life with AIDS. She saw Dr. Ric Marlink, one of many talented doctors who she said “could be working on Park Avenue,” but instead chose to answer a higher call in “the trenches.” She cradled orphans — some of the 12 million in sub-Saharan Africa created by AIDS, according to Avert.org — who can never be adopted because they have no identifying paperwork. She met an American father who adopted four Romanian children who got the virus after receiving transfusions — “to make them strong,” she recalled, nearly in tears — of blood from sailors of the Black Sea. She walked beside a Tanzanian mother who, despite sharing the virus with her husband, gave birth to an HIV-negative baby girl as a result of the treatment. She named the child Faith and now acts as an AIDS awareness counselor in her community. “That’s a life right there,” Ms. Crocitto said. “You see it. You see it and you touch it. And it’s an unbelievable miracle to watch.” Another miracle, which she did not expect to see, was a country of smiling faces. “It didn’t really matter what the situation was,” she said. “It was in the hospitals. It was in the schools. It was in the orphanages. It was in dairy farms, coffee plantations, anywhere where everybody was just doing whatever they could to live and survive. They all smiled, the whole time. “And then I come back to New York, that I love so much, and everyone just looked so angry with their $5 cup of Starbucks in their hands and I thought, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ I’m walking down Park Avenue and everyone just seems so stressed and angry. And there I was and I have hundreds of pictures of faces of hope.”
Answering the Call Self-described as “a person who needs to touch results,” Maria Crocitto does not expect the average New Canaanite to leave their families and hop on a plane to Africa in a private crusade to save the world. “I am living proof that you can do it if you really want to,” she said. But aside from rolls of smiling, defiant youthful faces, Ms. Crocitto also returned from Tanzania with an understanding of just how far private donations go. “Literally, you could give somebody life,” she said. “It’s unbelievable that we have that power. Those checks are helping to save kids every day.” When the group pooled $1,600 “impromptu pay” to buy four cows for the Meru Women’s Dairy Farmers Association — a cooperative of women working to produce milk to sell at the market — Ms. Crocitto said the women were in tears. She and the 39 other people who participated in AIDS Walk 2007 raised more than $600,000, and counting. Ms. Crocitto said she took on the challenge not as a physician or a medical writer, but “as a human being who believes that we can actually do something.” She learned that people — especially parents — have the same worries in “polar opposite” places such as New Canaan and Tanzania, only to different degrees. “And when a worry is hunger or death from a preventable disease,” she said, the responsibility “is to replace that suffering with hope.” “I believe that now I can tell a story that can spread to people — not from a book that I have read, and not from the newspapers with the horrible statistics, and not from the CDC reports that show that we still have a problem and people are dying all around us. But I feel that I can echo Dr. Marlink’s words that ‘once you see it you can’t do anything else.’” More information about the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation can be found at www.pedaids.org. Those who wish to contribute via to Ms. Crocitto’s walk should visit awa2007.kintera.org. Be the first to hear what’s going on in New Canaan. To sign up for the Advertiser 's breaking news list, e-mail breakingnews2@ncadvertiser.com. Subject: Breaking news. © Copyright 2007 by Hersam Acorn Newspapers |
