Thursday, May 06, 1999

Safe haven for children affected by AIDS

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One Christian family's struggle with the disease inspired Lydia's House

BY JULIE IRWIN
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Carla Mentlow, education director at Lydia's House, reads to children there daily. (Michael E. Keating photo) | ZOOM |

        There are clues all over Lydia's House — subtle but persistent ones — that something is different about this day-care center.

        One child cries whenever an ambulance goes by, reminded of the time her mother was taken away in one. Others exaggerate the slightest physical ailment, so that a scratch on the knee sends another child to the floor howling in pain.

        On trips to libraries and theaters, caregivers leave off the children's last names and the center's name from name tags, lest anyone figure out why they go to Lydia's House. For the same reasons, the people who run the day-care center don't want anyone to know where it is and won't allow the children to be photographed.

IF YOU GO

• What: Fund-raiser for Lydia's House, a day-care center for children affected by AIDS. Dr. Jimmy Allen, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and a father, grandfather and father-in-law of AIDS patients, will speak.   • When: May 13 at 6:30 p.m.   • Where: Vernon Manor, 400 Oak St., Avondale   • Cost: $20   • Tickets: 221-4100.   • Miscellaneous: Lydia's House also needs cash donations, non-perishable food, cleaning supplies and arts and crafts supplies. Donations can be sent to Lydia's House, P.O. Box 19971, Cincinnati OH 45219. Please call if you wish to donate.

        Lydia's House, a day-care center for children affected by AIDS, is a place of both secrets and hope. Housed at the moment in a Tristate church, the center has a need to grow, and it will move this summer to a Bond Hill orphanage.

        In an age of protease inhibitors and talk of AIDS as a chronic, manageable disease, it is easy to forget that the disease still has the power to terrify. Lydia's House is a reminder of that terror.

        “I didn't know there was still a need in the '90s for a secret. That just really overwhelmed me, with all the education and training, that people would still be fearful,” says Carla Mentlow, the center's education director.

        It is also a reminder of the failure of many religious institutions to respond to AIDS. Lydia Allen, the center's namesake, was the wife, daughter and daughter-in-law of ministers. She was ostracized by the church when AIDS decimated her family in the 1980s.

        Mrs. Allen's father-in-law, Dr. Jimmy Allen, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, will come to Cincinnati next Thursday for a fund-raiser for Lydia's House. He has seen improvement in the way churches address AIDS since his daughter-in-law and two grandsons died from the disease, but he says plenty of room for improvement remains.

        “There's still a reluctance, a fear and a shame factor. There's an element of Christianity that continues to do a diatribe about AIDS as a judgment against homosexuality,” Dr. Allen says from his home in Big Canoe, Ga. “There's a silence and a shunning that goes on that is tragic. We're a long way from where we were, but we're a long way from where we ought to be.”

Book inspires locals
        Jan Ellerhorst-Ryan was a nurse working with AIDS patients and a member of Westwood-Cheviot Church of Christ when she decided, about four years ago, to help families affected by HIV. She and friends Doug and Carolyn Faust set out to find where the gaps in AIDS care were in Greater Cincinnati.

        With the help of the national group Love & Action, they found the needs. And with Dr. Allen's book, Burden of a Secret (Moorings), about his family's sufferings, they found the inspiration.

        After her infant son Bryan had died of AIDS, Mrs. Allen set out to open a day-care center for AIDS-affected families in Dallas. Keeping her own illness a secret, she told everyone that Bryan's House was named for one of the first children in Dallas to die from AIDS. She didn't tell anyone that he was her son.

        “We drew a lot of inspiration from what Lydia had done,” Mr. Faust, of Madeira, says. “The big part of our goal is to care for these children, let them know there's a God who loves them. The other big thing is opening the body of Christ to caring for people with AIDS.”

        The Fausts and Ms. Ellerhorst-Ryan met HIV-positive mothers whose children had been kicked out of day care and others who were afraid to put their children in a center. Mr. Faust says the group approached a few community centers and found they were reluctant, delaying a decision until the group gave up.

        They finally set up an agreement for a spot in a Cincinnati church, in a sunny classroom painted with a mural of Noah's Ark and littered with toys and miniature chairs. Naming the center was perhaps the easiest part of the process.

        On a recent morning at the center, four children ages 3-5 ran around the classroom, painted scenes from Scripture and asked a visitor to read books to them. The center provides breakfast and lunch, and each child's cubbyhole has a pillow and blanket for naptime.

        The scenes of utter normalcy, though, are punctuated by moments that reveal the children's pain. The children don't know that their mothers are sick, but they know something is wrong.

        “There's a lot of anger that goes on here,” Ms. Mentlow says, in between refereeing spats over a doll. “It's always on my mind because I can see their pain — the clinginess, the fear of having people here. Even when I worked with homeless people, it wasn't as great.”

        Since the first AIDS case was diagnosed locally in 1983, 11 children have died of the disease, another 11 children are HIV-positive, and four have moved away from the area, Mr. Faust says.

        But the most frequent recipients of care from Lydia's House are the 285 children whose immediate family members — almost always their mothers — receive AIDS services. Provider agencies estimate there are another 100 to 200 children they don't know about.

        The center can care for up to six youngsters at a time and has had to turn away infants and toddlers because it can't accommodate them. The new Lydia's House, at St. Aloysius Orphanage in Bond Hill, will be able to care for infants. It will eventually serve 30 to 50 children in day care and another 30 to 50 in after-school programs.

        The move will take place this summer. Organizers are hoping that the fund-raiser with Dr. Allen will help pay for the move and the expansion.

Devastation of a family
        Dr. Jimmy Allen's friends took to referring to him as a modern-day Job after the series of devastations that struck his family in the 1980s. His daughter-in-law and two beloved grandsons died from AIDS. Another son is engaged in an ongoing battle with the disease. Worst of all, the institution to which Dr. Allen had devoted his life — the Christian church — failed his family utterly in their time of need.

        During a difficult labor in 1982, Lydia Allen received a tainted blood transfusion in time for it to circulate through her first son, Matthew, before he was born. Her second son, Bryan, was born in 1985, just months before the family learned that the transfusion had contained the virus that causes AIDS.

        The family was living in Colorado when Lydia and the boys all tested positive for HIV. They turned to the church where her husband Scott was a minister for help. Instead, they found rejection: Scott Allen was asked to leave his position, their older son was barred from Sunday school, and the family kept the illness a secret for years.

        After their rejection at the church where Scott worked, they moved to Dallas, where Dr. Allen and his wife, Wanda, lived. Even with the elder Allen's many church connections, the family was unable to find a place for Matt to attend Sunday school.

        It was an epiphany for Dr. Allen. Now chaplain of a mountain resort community 50 miles north of Atlanta, he is frank in his criticism of organized Christianity.

        “It hit me hard when I realized that the church as an institution had so failed that it could not summon the cleansing touch of Jesus for a four-year-old child,” he writes. “...We (in the church) don't minister to those in need because we cannot afford to offend and lose paying members or prospects for membership.

        “The fear of a deadly disease is enough to cause widespread panic in our church, not because the hurting people would fail to find us or refuse to come in, but because the comfortable and complacent people would be in such a hurry to get out.”

        Baby Bryan died in 1985, just months after he was born. Lydia was next: she died in 1992 at the age of 38. By that time, Dr. Allen had learned that the middle of his three sons, Skip, was gay and had been infected with the AIDS virus.

        Matthew died in 1996. Skip is alive and able to work, thanks to the protease inhibitors that are helping many AIDS patients. Scott remarried and later divorced, studied Eastern religions and now lives in Sydney, Australia with a new wife.

        Dr. Allen shuns the Job label, turned off by what he considers Job's whininess. As he struggled with the church's failure to respond to his family's devastation, though, he found his own faith in God reaffirmed.

        “The testing of the relationship with the Father is always a part of the grief experience, and that's true whatever the grief source,” he says. “There are things you learn about God and yourself that you'd never know any other way, and I'm grateful for that. You never want to waste the pain.”

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