Volunteers Fill Void for AIDS Patients : Treatment: Rural enclave of western Colorado provides training for ‘companion- : advocates’ of people with the ‘big-city’ disease.

Lance Gray works at a plumbing-and-heating business in this conservative community on the Western Slope of the Rocky Mountains, where most people consider AIDS a big-city problem.

And in his jeans and boots and cowboy hat, Gray hardly looks the part of a social worker.

Yet Gray spends a dozen hours a week as friend and advocate for a man infected with the AIDS virus. The man most likely will die. When he does, Gray will be there, just as he was six months ago for another AIDS patient he met only last year.

Gray is one of the volunteers trained as “companion-advocates” for AIDS sufferers in this rural enclave of western Colorado.

Gray, 42, sought out the program a year ago after his brother died of the complications of AIDS. He says friends and work mates commend his volunteer work, but he often encounters people who think the disease should be shunned.

“Most people don’t know anything about (AIDS) and they don’t want to know,” he says. “I wouldn’t have cared either until my brother died. I didn’t give a darn; it was somebody else’s problem.”

Many AIDS sufferers, shunned by society because they are homosexual or because of fears of transmission of the virus, are abandoned by their families and have little or no money. Companion-advocates offer friendship and assistance. They take patients to doctor appointments, help them take medication, take them out for meals, or even go camping with them.

But, most importantly, they remain with the patient as he or she dies.

“We will not let a client die alone,” says program organizer Robert Barone. “That’s our promise.”

Gray recently sat in on a program training session in the basement of a Grand Junction church. Eighteen new volunteers, ages 13 to 67, listened to a local attorney explain legal dilemmas encountered by a dying AIDS patient.

Later that day, two Grand Junction doctors fielded medical questions about AIDS, which destroys the body’s immune system and kills its victims.

The 40-hour seminar, spread over two weekends, ended with a church service memorializing the two dozen AIDS patients who have died on Colorado’s Western Slope.

A retired federal employee, Barone organized the program in 1991 after moving to Grand Junction from California. He and his brother and a nurse from the Grand Junction Veterans Medical Center run the Warren McKerrow AIDS Foundation, a tiny nonprofit group that helps coordinate AIDS education on the Western Slope.

Barone speaks to school groups, churches, service clubs or anyone who will listen. He often takes young adults who have tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS.

He says he was told that conservative Grand Junction and western Colorado weren’t ready to face the realities of AIDS, perceived as a homosexual disease.

“As it turned out, it was just totally the opposite,” he recalls. “I had to turn people away. The response was overwhelming.”

Barone has organized four seminars that have trained 62 volunteers. Eighteen people in Grand Junction with the HIV virus have been assigned companion-advocates, and Barone wants to train enough volunteers so that at least three advocates can be assigned to each AIDS patient who needs help.

The volunteers come from all age groups, all professions, all walks of life, Barone says.

Terry Catlin, a Grand Junction real estate agent, says she volunteered for the training after reading about it in a local newspaper.

“I have always felt that you don’t just stand around complaining about what needs to be done,” she says. “You are the person that needs to do it.”

Susan Cockrell-Grant, a community activist in Hotchkiss, helped organize a seminar for clergymen from Grand Junction, Hotchkiss, Paonia, Fruita, Crawford and Cedaredge.

“I’ve heard through the grapevine that there are people in our valley that have AIDS or are HIV-positive,” she says. “We just hope to be able to respond to it in an intelligent and loving way.”

Working as a companion-advocate can be a draining experience, and it’s not for everyone. Barone says he screens potential volunteers to make sure they’re up to the task.

“The most difficult part for me was spending 14 to 16 hours a day in the hospital watching somebody die and not being able to do anything,” Gray says.

His first client died in June, after six days in the hospital. Gray dropped out of the program for three months before deciding to do it again.

Barone says Gray called him one day and said, “Either I get another client today, or I’m never going to do it again.”

“So I assigned him one.”

Though Barone has no shortage of volunteers, he says he still routinely encounters ignorance and prejudice about the disease.

“I’ve had people tell me to my face that they’re not going to get the disease because they’re heterosexual,” he says. “There are still people I run into who have no idea we have an AIDS problem.

“They don’t want to hear about it. They think of it as in New York or Los Angeles . . . but not Grand Junction.”