Parents With AIDS, Family Share Holiday

Life couldn’t get much tougher for Abel Martinez.

He’s rearing his sisters’ six children in a one-bedroom apartment in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. One sister died of AIDS and the other may soon follow.

Martinez tried to put his troubles aside last Sunday at a Christmas party for 103 children whose parents, many of them poor and most women raising children alone, are dying of AIDS.

“This party is a nice break,” said Martinez, a 31-year-old who looks more like the brother than the guardian of his nephew and five nieces.

“The gifts, the entertainment. We have sadness, but being here keeps everyone from thinking about it for awhile.”

It was the second annual party for AIDS families served by Selfhelp, a nonprofit agency founded by Holocaust survivors.

Selfhelp provides home-care workers to keep a family together as long as possible by helping parents do laundry, cook and run errands. The agency also helps find guardians to raise the children when their mothers die.

“It’s beautiful to come and see all this,” Nelida Burgos, a 32-year-old mother of three, said at the party. “You’re so happy you forget you are sick. And that’s nice for the holidays.”

Martinez, like some of the other families, has a double burden--children who are HIV positive. Martinez’s nephew, 3 1/2-year-old Michael, was born with the virus. The boy’s mother, who died in January, was infected with the disease through sexual contact, he said.

Many of the home-care workers were on hand to chase after children while sick parents relaxed. There was a sing-along, a clown performing magic tricks, and Santa Claus, of course.