Champeau pushes changes in how Africa treats AIDS

By Tony Lystra
Gazette-Times reporter

The woman had nothing. Her husband was dead — maybe from AIDS, maybe something else. Local custom prevented her from inheriting her husband’s property, a simple, brick house with a dirt floor and a metal roof held down by rocks, so there was nothing to do but mourn.

Donna Champeau didn’t say much. She mainly listened.

It was clear that the villagers in this south African nation would have to care for the woman. But because at least a third of them were probably infected with HIV, Champeau feared the widow would have to fend for herself.

“I remember that night going back to the motel and just sitting and looking at one of my colleagues,” said Champeau, an associate professor in the Department of Public Health at Oregon State University.

“We both just looked at each other and were, like, what are we doing here?”

Champeau and her colleagues had traveled to Lesotho on a grant from the U.S. State Department to try what, in this part of Africa, is a novel idea. The goal was to get relatively well-off faculty members from the National University of Lesotho to help small, struggling AIDS groups in treating the poor and infected.

For Champeau, the project, conducted during three trips to the continent between 2002 and 2004, is part of a long fight for the rights of women to get basic health care.

“I’ve been called all sorts of things,” she said Thursday, “‘feminist,’ ‘radical feminist.’ I always say thank you, because feminist, to me, is synonymous with equality.”

In Africa, Champeau, who has taught at OSU since 1996, had essentially become a broker between classes in a country where disparities between the educated and the poor are as great as the nearby Kalahari Desert.

Men there were traveling to find work at nearby mines, spending time with prostitutes, and bringing diseases back their wives. AIDS was spreading into the country on a network of roads. And the women who were infected had trouble finding money or time away from their children to get health care.

In the midst of this were small groups, just a crude hodge-podge of people, tasked with fighting AIDS. Care providers rarely wore latex gloves during examinations. Basic sanitation was virtually nonexistent. Many didn’t know how to apply for a government grant.

The goal was to get professors, who lived in a relatively upscale social universe, to teach the groups how to write grants, how to provide basic health care and educate the public better about the spread of the disease.

Champeau, 51, showed up in Maseru, the country’s largest city, with only a name — one person who might help out.

“We got a phone book. We bought a cell phone. We got a SIM card. We started calling.”

Much of this went on in 95-degree heat in the back of a little car that leaked exhaust.

“I was just green the whole day,” she said.

In Lesotho, the project was less than successful.

The country,” Champeau said, “just wasn’t ready to implement it. They just didn’t have the right leadership in the different organizations.”

But in Botswana, where Champeau and her colleagues also tried the program, it worked.

In fact, this year, that country’s government decided to fund the program, providing a coordinator who could help connect the AIDS groups with University of Botswana faculty.

Champeau is now writing a paper on the experiment and plans to get back to Africa as grant money allows.

“The thing that makes you want to go back,” she said, “is the wonderful people — always dancing, always smiling.”



Donna Champeau

AGE: 51

RESEARCH AND PROFESSIONAL INTEREST: Helping populations at risk for HIV/AIDS; disparities in health care for women.

EDUCATION: Doctorate, Oregon State University; Master of Science, University of Wisconsin.

BOOKS: “Women’s Health: Addressing Disparities in a Multicultural World,” 2005; “AIDS and STDs: A Global Perspective,” 2005.

Women of Achievement

This week, the Gazette-Times is recognizing the five Women of Achievement being honored by the Oregon State University Women’s Center.

Donna Champeau, Barb Gartner, Paula Krane, Lisa Ede and Diane Crocker will be honored at a reception from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. today in the campus Women’s Center, 1700 S.W. Pioneer Place. Gartner, Krane, Ede and Crocker were featured in front-page stories earlier this week.