Hiding his illness, teen lives a double life

Samual is 14. He is tall and lean with a talent for basketball and has the chiseled features of a potential teen idol. He looks healthy and handsome, his grandmother says. But he leads a double life.

He can tell no one at school or in his low-income L.A. neighborhood that both his parents died of AIDS when he was a baby -- or that he was born HIV positive and now has AIDS himself.

When kids who want to be friendly ask what happened to his parents, he lies. When they wonder why he gets so sick sometimes, he lies some more. He wants to fit in, has all the qualities that would make him popular -- but he cannot let anyone into his life.

His acquaintances would run from him if they knew the truth, his grandmother says. It might even affect the life of his two older, teenage sisters, who are perfectly healthy. They were born before their mother was infected, their grandmother says.

Samual is angry that he can never be himself. He’s angry that his sisters escaped the illness, though he’s happy for them.

He is angry that he hasn’t the energy to be the great basketball player he wants to be -- although he keeps trying whenever he feels well enough.

“The coaches let him play. They know about his illness, as do all his teachers,” says Samual’s grandmother, who has raised her three grandchildren since their parents died and does not want her name used.

She says he never discusses his parents or his illness with her. “We just don’t talk about any of it,” she says. “He wants it that way.”

Late last year, Samual had a setback that put him in the hospital for three months. “I spent every day and night with him,” his grandmother says. “The doctors told me he might not make it; there was nothing left for them to do. But they kept trying.” And Samual pulled through.

He is back in school, back on the basketball court, and back to his lonely and confused double life. Social workers are trying to help him sort through his feelings and his fears.

But the most helpful thing, they say, would be for him to be with other kids who are going through something similar: kids with whom he can open up, tell the truth and share his fears and experiences.

He will get that at Camp Laurel this summer, along with all the traditional joys of camp life. “He needs this desperately,” wrote one social worker who recommended that he go to the camp. “He has grown into a fine young man who works very hard at school, is a straight-A student and who hopes to go to college.”

About 11,000 children will go to camp this summer, thanks to the $1.6 million raised last year.

The annual fund-raising campaign is part of the Los Angeles Times Family Fund, a fund of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, which this year will match the first $1.1 million in contributions at 50 cents on the dollar.

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