Entering a life with AIDS

Pulling back the cloth door into Olivia’s world, participants step into a wood shack in Malawi to experience the ravishes of AIDS and HIV through the eyes of a girl raped at 17.
Olivia — pregnant and exposed to HIV — is one of four stories told in One Life Experience, a World Vision exhibit that opens today at Trinity Western University in Langley.
“A big part of being human is connection and emotion and having more than an intellectual understanding,” said Vancouver actress Gabrielle Miller, who helped launch the exhibit yesterday with
Mission rock band Faber Drive.
The exhibit provides “an emotional understanding of what it is to be a child living with AIDS or having AIDS change your life,” Miller said.
The audio-visual exhibit plunges people, by way of
a first-person narrative headset, into the lives of children impacted by AIDS in Zambia, Malawi and Uganda.
The exhibit, a 186-square-metre interactive village, was featured at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto in 2006, and has toured Canada since August 2007.
More than 18,000 people have passed through the exhibits’ doors, said spokesman Brandon Foreman.
-jeff.hodson@metronews.ca