WESTMINSTER : Quilt Makes AIDS Real to Students

About 1,500 Westminster High School students somberly filed past panels of the AIDS memorial quilt in the school gymnasium Wednesday.

It was the first time that sections of the quilt had been displayed at a high school campus in the county, officials said.

A senior said the display was especially meaningful. His brother died of AIDS only last week, he said.

The senior’s classmates are thinking about creating a 3-by-6-foot panel to be incorporated into the national quilt and dedicated to the student’s brother.

“I’m pretty sure that my family would be honored,” the youth said.

Amber Smith, 17, the school’s minister for public affairs who arranged for the one-day display, said she is proud that her high school is the first in the county to display the quilt panels.

“Most kids think that AIDS is for when you get older,” she said. “They don’t think it’s going to happen to them now.”

Rosalba Ramirez, 16, said the display of the four sections of the national quilt made the threat of AIDS more real to her and helped to emphasize how important it is “for us to protect ourselves.”

Vice Principal Anji Clemens said students showed “a great respect and reverence, as if they were at graveside.”

“This (quilt display) makes it real,” she said. “Unless something is made real to them, it doesn’t exist.”

The quilt panels, on loan from the NAMES Project headquarters in San Francisco, were made available by Barbara Davis, a project outreach and education coordinator for the Orange County NAMES Project chapter.

Davis was motivated to work on the memorial quilt project when her only child, Gregg, 28, died of AIDS in 1990, she said.

“He was too sick to even whisper, and he wrote the word quilt on a piece of paper,” she said. “I promised him I’d put his name on the quilt.”

Quilt panels frequently include photos, mementos and expressions of love from survivors of the deceased.

On one, a daughter left a message to her mother: “You are always in my heart--a little flame burning always.”

Health education consultant Nathan Matza, who teaches health classes at Westminster High School and at Cal State Long Beach, said a class survey shows that only about one-third of his high school students protect themselves against AIDS. Many don’t communicate with each other about the disease, he said.

Matza said he believes that Wednesday’s program is important because it increases awareness among students.

The AIDS memorial quilt is a tribute to the hundreds of thousands of people who have died of the disease. It is made up of thousands of 3-by-6-foot fabric panels, each one bearing the name of a single person lost to AIDS.

Friends, lovers and family members create the panels, which are shipped to San Francisco, where volunteers stitch them into the quilt.