The Reader, San Diego, California - Volume 21, Number 39 - October 8, 1992
Abe Opincar

"Don't write about that," she says from her office in San Juan Capistrano. "Don't write about me -- I'm not the story. My work is the story."

There is, however, no way of writing about her work without writing about her, about her technical talents, about how she believes the Almighty uses her as a vessel for His love. It is not every day, after all, that a transsexual Anglican nun who once served in Vietnam, single-handedly launches and maintains the largest AIDS information computer bulletin board in the world.

"It all started in 1990," she says, "when I went to rural Missouri to tend a herd of cows that had been left to our order . . ."

While the area was isolated, its residents insular, she found people living there with AIDS, struggling on their own with the disease with little or no state-of-the-art information to help them. Television reception was very poor and newspapers scarce, but Sister Mary Elizabeth noticed that many of the area's residents had personal computers, and that, she says, started her thinking. When she returned to California later that year, she began talking with friends about starting a free national AIDS information bulletin board.

"There are plenty out there, but most of them are expensive. They can run anywhere from $45 to $500 dollars an hour, and there's no way that your average person with AIDS can access that information at that cost. There are people out there who want to make money off this terrible disease. Something had to be done."

In late 1990, Sister Mary Elizabeth, a long-time computer afficiando, officially went on-line with an 80-megabyte IBM compatible and quickly ran out of space. She had more than 500 files of AIDS-related information, but there was much, much more. She knew she had to go to more than one phone line; she needed high-speed modems.

In June 1991, a Japanese businessman made this possible. He donated $21,000 to the HIV/AIDS Info BBS, which allowed Sister Mary Elizabeth to invest in a more powerful IBM-compatible with a 660-megabyte hard drive, eSoft TBBS software, two high-speed U.S. Robotics modems, and two incoming lines. With the expanded capacity, the database mushroomed to more than 1500 files. [Ed. Note: Today, the system houses more than 300,000 AIDS-related files].

The range of information is so vast, its quality so dependable, that national and international organizations such as AmFar and the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease have started logging on to the electronic bulletin board on a daily basis. So far this year, it has served close to 20,000 callers, some from as far afield as Australia, Spain, and the Netherlands. And the demand is growing. Sister Mary Elizabeth, her eyesight slowly failing, regularly works 11 hours a day keeping the files up to date, adding new data culled from 19 professional journals and scores of other sources.

"I don't understand," she says, "how we, as individuals created in the image of a loving God, could simply stand by in the face of this epidemic and do nothing. God loves us so much that he sent his son to die -- not just for one person, but for all of us. Because of that love, we have a responsibility to others. Because of that love I can't see how we could oppress others or allow others to be oppressed."

Copyright (c) 1992 Abe Opincar and the Reader. Permission to reproduce granted by Abe Opincar.

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