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July 2003
Meet the New NEAC Directors
Tyrone Fowlkes
Tyrone’s introduction to NEAC came while he was in Indianapolis. He was new to the Episcopal Church but had recently earned an M.Div. from Christian Theological Seminary and was looking for an opportunity to use his skills in religious leadership and community empowerment. He also had a passion for HIV/AIDS advocacy. “I was already familiar with the faces of AIDS, particularly in the black community,” he said. “I had many friends who had died; like so many others, I attended many funerals.” With a strong desire to help, he joined the boards of Brothers United of Indianapolis and the Indiana HIV/AIDS Alliance. Later, he became certified by the American Red Cross to train in HIV/AIDS education.
While in Indianapolis, Tyrone’s spiritual director was The Rev. Gordon Chastain, long-time NEAC board member and officer. Gordon “helped me not only to discern professional HIV work but also to move to Chicago,” where he now resides. Presently, he is coordinator of faith-based programs for AIDS Pastoral Care Network (APCN) in Chicago. APCN is a program of Access Community Health Network, which recently merged with Sinai Medical Group to become one of the largest networks of community health centers in the country. The mission of APCN is to support the spiritual health and growth of individuals and communities affected by HIV/AIDS through pastoral care, outreach, education and training, and the promotion of social justice. “You can understand why APCN was very attractive to me,” Tyrone said.
Tyrone’s role at APCN is to interface with African-American faith communities on Chicago’s South Side to encourage and support them in building AIDS ministries. “Part of my work is to train and educate pastors in confronting much of the stigma around HIV/AIDS,” he said. “Because the center of the black community is the black church, a primary goal is to help raise awareness so churches can minister effectively to those impacted by HIV/AIDS within their congregations and surrounding neighborhoods.”
“As a member of the black gay community and an aspirant to the Episcopal priesthood,” Tyrone explained, “I hear a very present call to create communities of support for all who live on the margins of both church and society. HIV/AIDS is as much about economics as it is about race, sexuality, class, and gender. Now, as we see the disease spreading rapidly among people of color, women and children, and youth of all ethnic groups, how we address this issue has to change.”
Canon Sue B. Kuebler
In 1989 the Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Paul in Erie, Pennsylvania, asked Sue Kuebler to work with the Youth Group on the curriculum on AIDS provided by the National Church in response to 1989 General Convention Resolutions. At the time the Cathedral organist/choirmaster “was very privately dying of AIDS,” Sue said. “Through his death and dying my own religious journey became complete. Through his death and dying, I fully embraced the resurrection story, my own fears of death were taken away, and I realized that I was called to AIDS ministry.”
Over the last 13 years Sue has instituted educational programs on the prevention and transmission of HIV/AIDS in the diocese for both religious and secular groups. She also created a county AIDS Service Network that included the Erie County Dept. of Health and the Northwest Pennsylvania Rural AIDS Alliance, the local granting agency for Ryan White Federal funds, as well as numerous other service organizations.
With a lot of work on Sue’s part, in 1994 St. Paul’s became the first Cathedral church in the nation to host a NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt display. Now the church not only holds its own displays every World AIDS Day but takes the Quilt out into the community—this year to 17 sites.
Quilt panels have been created by the St. Paul panel-making groups, and, Sue said, “This year, we will accept a Quilt panel created by female inmates at the Albion Prison.”
A past president of the Cathedral League (the Episcopal Church Women’s organization) and a lay Eucharistic Minister and Reader, Sue was also honored with the 2000 NEAC Award. At the diocesan convention in November of 2001 the Bishop, the Rt. Reverend Robert D. Rowley, Jr., installed Sue as Canon Missioner of the Diocese of Northwestern Pennsylvania for her ministry to the diocese—”particularly my passion for AIDS ministry,” Sue added..
Sue, who also runs a catering business, doesn’t do all this on her own: “My family—my husband, J. Clarke Kuebler, and our three daughters, Sarah (19), Emily (18), and Laura (17)—have been extremely instrumental and supportive in my work in our diocese and beyond. In fact, it could be said that the Kuebler family is the AIDS ministry at the Cathedral!”
The Rev. Valerie Thomas
Nineteen years ago, Valerie found herself 40, single, and dating. “I was working part-time in a physician’s office,” she said. “He started telling me about this new virus called ‘HIV.’ At that point, he wasn’t sure if women could be infected, but he warned me nevertheless.”
Two years later, she married and her husband took a job on the road working for a publishing company. “I spent many hours alone in hotel rooms watching talk shows,” she said. “Programs like Oprah had whole shows about AIDS that caught my interest as a nurse.” Later, when Valerie began doing transcriptions for a large hospital in Miami, “There were more and more reports about women and children infected with the virus. I found myself reading anything and everything I could on it.”
Settling in the Gainesville area, Valerie began volunteering at the University of Florida Pediatric HIV Clinic. Kids came in without shoes, shampoo, soap, food. “Most were with foster parents,” she said. “A few came with their own mothers, who tended to be very sick themselves.”
“The first day I went to the clinic there was an 8-year-old girl with huge brown eyes behind bright pink glasses almost as big as her face and her blonde hair in a pony tail. She sat in her wheelchair with oxygen attached. Her eyes penetrated my soul. She said, ‘Take off my shoes.’ I did. She said, ‘Take off my socks.’ I did. She said. ‘Scratch my feet.’ I did, gingerly. She said, ‘Nails.’ I said, ‘I might hurt you with my nails.’ She said, ‘Use your nails and get in between my toes.’ I wanted to get up and run; I didn’t scratch between my husband’s toes, let alone a child with full-blown AIDS. I sat there knowing this was the most important test in this ministry so far. A little voice spoke in my heart: ‘You can wash your hands afterwards.’ I scratched between her toes. My AIDS ministry had begun.”
Over the years, Valerie was called to the hospital at all times of the day and night. She brought children home to live with her and her husband while they had IV therapy at the hospital. “I cried with young mothers who found out they were HIV positive only when, becoming pregnant, they were tested. I cried for the baby born positive to a local prostitute. When I went to the healing services, I cried for the young men, wasted and weak. It just went on and on.”
“I have been affected by this virus to the point of being ordained specifically to minister to those living with HIV/AIDS,” Valerie says. “On the days when I think I can’t do it any more, I remember a quote from John Claypool: ‘What breath is to the physical body, hope is to the human spirit,’ and I hope. Where there is life, there is hope; more important, where there is hope, there is life.”
