Dolls of Hope promotes HIV/AIDS education and discussion
L.A. health activist Cynthia Davis has people make and exchange cloth dolls worldwide, from Compton to Tanzania, to break stigma.
Cynthia Davis, one of Los Angeles' best-known HIV/AIDS activists, has logged 580,000 miles on her Camry station wagon and replaced the engine twice in her decadelong campaign of using dolls to educate young and old about the deadly disease.
Her latest stop was at Westchester High School a few days before Christmas. As usual, Davis brought along her Dolls of Hope: hand-stitched pieces made by AIDS awareness groups around the world.
She used the colorful cloth dolls to help lure students to her information booth. Once she had their attention, Davis went to work.
"Did you know that the rates of gonorrhea and chlamydia in Los Angeles County are increasing fastest among black and Latina women between 15 and 24?" she asked a group of four Latina students.
The young women shook their heads no, listened to Davis and then grabbed a stick of lip balm and a few fliers titled "Get Informed, Get the Facts" and "What's Up With HIV/AIDS."
Davis, the director of HIV education and outreach programs at Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science, has been a titan of activism for more than two decades.
She started the county's first mobile HIV/AIDS testing van program in the early 1990s. Two years later she gave a presentation at the first Women's and AIDS Conference in Uganda and in 1996 gave a talk titled the "Global Impact of HIV/AIDS on Women" at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in China.
But Davis, 59, now also relies on the Dolls of Hope to spread her message.
After her daughter was born in 1985, Davis said, she had a tough time finding black dolls. She began collecting and making dolls herself -- she has a personal collection of about 600 -- and soon found she could use the craft to help promote her HIV/AIDS activism.
For World AIDS Day in 1998, Davis arranged for volunteers to make a few hundred cloth dolls that would be given nationally and internationally to women and children who were infected with HIV, had AIDS or were orphaned because of HIV/AIDS.
She asked participating agencies to create one or two dolls representing their communities and send them back as part of an exchange program. The Dolls of Hope project was continued indefinitely, and Davis has since partnered with agencies as far away as South Africa, India, Tanzania and Malawi and as close as Alabama and Compton.
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