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Yup'ik Raven This collection of student work is from Frank Keim's classes. He wants to share these works for others to use as an example of culturally-based curriculum and documentation. These documents have been OCR-scanned and are available for educational use only.


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The Kerry Story by John Tikiun Jr

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The Kerry Story

8/28/91-- Hi. My name is Kerry and I'm 20 years old. I'm here to tell you about my life and how I got AIDS. It all started when I was 15 years old. All of my friends and I thought that it was cool to have boys over at our houses. I really liked boys a lot and I stayed with them once a week or sometimes twice a week. I never thought about the virus And I thought that boys would like me more because I went to bed with them. And I thought all the girls in school thought the same way. As a teenager I had dreams of being a doctor or a teacher for second graders.

8/09/93-- Now I'm 17 years old and boys know that I have HIV. Almost everybody knows now. I have to go in to the doctor's office to see how I'm doing every other day. I think of boys as jerks because they should have checked themselves to see if they had the virus. But really it was my fault for not being careful and using a condom. Now am I dying because of one night of having sex. If a girl had a brain she wouldn't have boys around her. Me too. If I only had known a little more about sex and AIDS, I think that I wouldn't have had sex at all.

9/14/94-- Now I'm 18 years old and the virus is getting worse. But I'm out of school and my job is to talk about AIDS and how not to get it. I think that most girls now know what to do and not to do. I think that girls now have a little more faith in themselves because I see very few of them with the boys. If I was to put back time I would not have had sex with those boys because one of them was infected with the virus. I go to classrooms in schools to talk about it. I tell the students what it feels like to have HIV and what I'm going through, and I answer their questions. I tell them it would help people if they went to the doctor to have a check-up to see if they had HIV. I also tell them to only have one sex partner.

10/23/96-- A few years have passed, and now I'm 20 years old and the virus is now full-blown AIDS. Doctors say that my life is nearing the end, and now all I've got to say is that if you want to have sex, play it safe and wear a condom. And have yourself checked before you even begin to have sex.

By: John Tikiun Jr.

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