It is a sunny day and the back door of the house on Crescent Street is wide open. A soap opera is playing in one of the two common rooms. The couches in the adjoining room are empty, their cushions slightly askew.
Although it is located across the street from Middlesex Hospital, the Oasis Wellness Center, a support facility for people living with HIV and AIDS, strives to offer clients a homey, not sterile, environment.
“This is a wellness center, not a medical center,” said Eric Sullivan ’06, a volunteer at the center. “A lot of these people don’t have the support of a family, or any family at all. They just need someone to talk to.”
The center, an affiliate of the Community Health Center, offers a wide range of services, including case management, group and individual support groups, mental health care, testing, education, transportation, a food pantry, and alternative therapies, including acupuncture and massage.
Posted on the center’s bulletin board are fliers on everything from smoking cessation groups to dental exams to lectures on nutrition.
“All of our services are in one building, which is amazing,” said HIV educator Mark Gaffey.
Not counting affected family and friends, Director Wendy Coco estimates that at any given time, Oasis has 90 clients.
The center depends on both state and federal funding. Particularly thanks to the federally-funded Connecticut AIDS Drug Assistance Program (CADAP), clients with incomes of less than $50,000 have free access to Oasis’s services. Largely for this reason, the Center’s clientele runs the socioeconomic gamut.
“We have homeless clients who spend their days on the streets and sleep under stairwells,” Gaffey said. “Everyone from bankers to housewives.”
On the other hand, according Coco, the federal and state governments’ relationship to the Center has, at times, been adversarial. In exchange for its funding, the government can decide how centers like Oasis allocate their money. In recent years, policy-makers have mandated that more money be devoted to dental and mental health care. Centers must often expand their medical care at the expense of auxiliary services such as counseling and transportation.
“Drop-in centers in the future will become obsolete,” Coco said. “If it wasn’t for the drop-in centers, people wouldn’t make it to their appointments. They wouldn’t take their meds because no one would remind them. We help people keep their lives together.”
Connecticut is number one in the nation for injection-related infections. It is also ranked number two in the nation for infections among women.
“The demographics for HIV have changed over the years,” Coco said. “It has gone from what was considered a gay man’s disease to an injection-drug disease.”
Many of the center’s clients continue to struggle with substance abuse even after they are diagnosed with HIV.
“Substance abuse is a coping mechanism and then you add this incredible weight of HIV,” Coco said. “People who don’t have the skills to survive day-to-day are overwhelmed. If you have that in your background it’s a safe place to return to.”
However, Oasis asks its clients to make a short-term commitment to sobriety. That is, the center prohibits clients from using substances on its premises but it does not attempt to regulate their behavior outside the facility. Seeing another client under the influence, Gaffey said, could cause a recovering abuser to relapse.
“We want to protect our clients who are trying really hard to stay clean,” Gaffey said.
Fundraising is critical to the survival of these non-medical programs. According to Coco, this is where University students can help.
Sullivan, who has been volunteering at Oasis for about four months, is organizing a benefit concert to raise money for the center. While $3 admission may seem like a drop in the bucket compared to federal funding, Sullivan insists that in the case of Oasis, every dollar makes a difference.
“It’s a big deal for them,” Sullivan said. “There’s this $39 DVD player at Walmart. It’s on their wish list so that they can have movie nights. If thirty people show up, they’ll have a DVD player. Every dollar will count.”
To ensure that younger students continue this partnership between the University and the center, Sullivan recently launched the student group Wesleyan Oasis Alliance (WOA). In addition to organizing the concert, the group will be the avenue through which Long Lane donates produce to the center’s food pantry.
Eighty-five students expressed interest at a recent tabling event, according to Sullivan, who said that he is cautiously optimistic.
“I’m hoping at least four or five will be underclassmen willing to make a commitment to Oasis and to WOA,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan is quick to note, however, that interacting with clients has been the bulwark of his volunteer experience.
“The most rewarding part of this experience is getting to talk to them,” Sullivan said. “I ask, ‘How are you doing?’ and it opens up this vein. Everything just flows out.”
Although Sullivan began volunteering with Oasis because he wanted experience interacting with patients, he was not fully at ease in his first few minutes with the clients.
“I was surprised at myself that I was a little hesitant, that I set myself apart from the clients a bit,” Sullivan said. “It was an eye-opening experience. It took away the disease and put in its place a human being.”
Now, however, Sullivan considers some of the clients his friends. When there was a shooting in town recently, he and some of the clients gathered around the television to watch news coverage.
“As far as diseases go, it’s one of the most stigmatized,” Sullivan said. “I didn’t have an understanding of the day-to-day challenges, how important your T-cell count is, how important it is to take your drugs every day. Before it was an abstract concept based on newspaper articles I’ve read. Now, it’s based on the experiences of the people I’ve met. [They live lives] where they’re constantly careful about what they’re doing.”
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