I was diagnosed HIV-positive in 2016, just after I had left Hawaiʻi for graduate school. It was a frightening time—between jobs, health insurance, the known and the unknown. I hadn’t yet started school, and I didn’t have coverage after leaving my job. But I was lucky. Organizations like HHHRC on the continent—like Caracole in Cincinnati and Temple University's HIV Clinic—stepped in to bridge the gap. They helped me get signed up for Medicaid, access critical testing, and begin treatment. More than that, they walked me through the maze of insurance, labs, and pharmacy pickups, ensuring that medicine wouldn’t be something I had to fight for.

When I moved back to Hawaiʻi, connecting with HHHRC gave me something I didn’t know I needed: the peace of mind that no matter what happens—whether to my health or my income—I have advocates in my corner. People who will make sure I have what I need to stay alive and keep living well.

I walk for those we’ve lost to AIDS—those whose lives were full of love and laughter, whose families and friends cherished them, but who didn’t have access to the care that now keeps me alive. I do not take for granted that I am here today—not because of who I am, or how I live, but because medicine is available to me. Because organizations like HHHRC make that possible.

HIV is a strange kind of lineage. It comes to us through a long chain of transmission and loss. Someone, somewhere, passed from this disease for me to now carry it differently. It creates an odd moʻokūʻauhau—a bloodline not just of biology, but of shared experience, survival, loss, and remembrance. It is filled with names that I can never recite because I will never know who passed before me. But I know they are there, and I call out not their names but their legacy. I strive to keep them alive through this ongoing work and advocacy.

I walk for those whose names I’ll never know, but whose lives and deaths I carry in my own body. I walk for those who didn’t get the chance to grow old, to fall in love again, to take one more walk around the block. I walk because I can. I walk because they are no longer here to walk for themselves.

And I walk to remind us all: love is powerful, but it’s not enough. We need medicine. We need care. We need each other.