Destitute Widow in AIDS Struggle

Olga Hernandez is 16. Despite everything that has happened during the past year, she looks younger. She is short and has dark, gamin features that remain youthful in repose or melancholy.

Olga has become a symbol of the onslaught of AIDS in Tijuana, appearing in television and newspaper reports on both sides of the border. Her husband, a 19-year-old street vendor named Luis Antonio Zavala, died of the disease in January. The couple previously lost a baby to the disease. Olga is HIV-positive--and eight months pregnant.

In the months before his death, Luis and Olga became active in education efforts by the gay community to counter deep-seated fear and ignorance of AIDS. Luis died in the upstairs room of a tiny cafe off Avenida Revolucion that is the headquarters of the anti-AIDS campaign. Activists videotaped his deathbed plea to authorities to provide for the afflicted, to prevent others from being turned away at city hospitals as Luis was.

Times appear to be changing. Olga, who grew up as a scavenger in the shantytown neighborhood at the Tijuana city dump, accompanied gay leaders to an unprecedented meeting with Baja California Gov. Ernesto Ruffo Appel several months ago.

At Ruffo’s direction, Olga is now receiving medical care at a state hospital. Her condition remains strong. She has moved back in with her mother’s family, which had kicked the couple out of the house after learning of their condition.

These days Olga attends weekly support meetings for AIDS-infected people and their families in the cafe where she watched her husband die on a mattress on the floor.

She spends her time thinking about the baby. She wonders if it will be healthy. She survives. And she waits.