A man who uses the power of rational speech unjustly can do great harm, Aristotle writes in Rhetoric. David Veazey (A97) does just the opposite: he employs carefully chosen words, solid evidence, and a well-crafted argument to save lives by helping to fight the spread of HIV/AIDS in Russia, where the government has downplayed the risk while new cases rise at an alarming rate.

Veazey lives in Moscow, where he works as a grant proposal writer for AIDS Foundation East-West (AFEW), a Dutch non-governmental humanitarian public health organization that seeks to reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The job taps two of his best attributes: he’s passionate about making a difference in the world and skilled at drawing together information from many sources and assembling a persuasive argument.

Consider Veazey’s editorial in the Kiev Post, which sought to meet the “rising hysteria” about HIV/AIDS in the Ukraine with clear and dispassionate logic. He pointed out that the stigma associated with the disease discourages people from being tested, tackled prevailing myths about how HIV is spread, and asked ordinary citizens to educate themselves and get involved in the fight against the disease. “In order to seriously address the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Ukraine,” he concluded, “the epidemic of fear and HIV hysteria must first be eradicated.”

The writing he does now is much different from the approach he took when he sat down to pen his senior essay on Plato’s Sophist. “St. John’s requires a different sort of writing that I never use in the outside world—that is, asking a lot of questions and not necessarily coming to any conclusion compared to thesis-argument-conclusion that the rest of the world is used to,” he explains.

Veazey developed persuasive writing skills on his own, noting that four years of the Socratic method prepared him well for the work he does today. “When I am working on grant proposals I try to act as sort of a Socratic midwife. I’m not an expert on any particular AIDS issue,but I try to ask the experts questions that will help them come up with a good project that will be interesting to a donor. This approach has St. John’s written all over it.”

Veazey’s route to Russia began at Fordham University in New York, where he was attending graduate school in economics and working part time and during summer breaks for Doctors Without Borders. He worked as a grant writer, then as a researcher for the international humanitarian organization’s access-to-medicines campaign. Ultimately, the work steered him away from economics.

“I became very interested in how the pharmaceutical industry worked and how it affected drug development for tropical diseases,” Veazey says. “I wanted to tie it to my economics studies in industrial organization somehow. I came up with several good thesis topics but the problem was ?nding the data to work with. All of my classmates were working on very esoteric topics with little relevance to people’s lives. This was mainly because the availability of data largely determines the topic. So I became more convinced that economics is inherently unable to answer any meaningful questions. . . I couldn’t see myself doing it as a career because of that.”

When the September 11 terrorist attacks sent the city of New York into an economic downturn, Veazey’s position at Doctors Without Borders came to an end, and he couldn’t ?nd work anywhere—even part time. Veazey decided that the time was right to visit a friend in Moscow, where he could explore the job market.

It was a risky move, primarily because English is not widely spoken in the city, and Veazey spoke no Russian. At first he patched together freelance work writing for magazines and newspapers for the U.S. expatriate community. That led to a job working for the Russian news agency Prime-Tass. Veazey’s language skills improved and he learned to edit “really, really fast,” but the job paid very little. Then he spotted an advertisement for a position with Aids Foundation East-West, “jumped on it, and got it.” His title is senior adviser on proposal development; in other words, bringing in money. He’s been at it for three years now, and his work is driven by urgency.

The AIDS epidemic is still new to the former Soviet Union, he says. According to UNAIDS, 860,000 people in Russia have HIV/AIDS, the majority of whom are drug users who contracted the virus from contaminated needles. The outbreak may be much higher than reported by the government, says Veazey. Many more people may not be aware they have HIV.

“The estimates vary widely because there isn’t any good data available. Some estimates are higher than a million. In the highest HIV-prevalence areas like Irkutsk and Samara, more than 1 percent of the population is estimated to be HIV-positive. Once it goes beyond 1 percent, the epidemic can easily become self-sustaining,” he says.

East-West sponsors projects supporting local organizations that work with injecting drug users, a method called “harm reduction,” says Veazey. “The ultimate goal is to get them not to use drugs, but in the meantime, they can use clean needles.”

Another foundation project seeks to prevent the spread of HIV in prisons; inmates have been trained as outreach workers, medical professionals and psychologists were trained on pre- and post-HIV test counseling, and disciplinary and custodial staff received training on reducing risk in the work place.

Until about five years ago, the Russian government was not aggressively involved with the spread of AIDS, Veazey says. “Politicians had been talking about increasing border security because they think the disease comes from abroad,” Veazey says.

The government became more active after Veazey’s organization and four others attracted grant funding from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, an international fund with $7.2 billion in pledges to fight three deadly epidemics. The Russian government donated $20 million to the fund, but did not apply for any grants itself. “In 2003 AFEW and the four other organizations applied for and won $89 million in grants over five year for HIV prevention,” says Veazey, who was the lead writer. “This caused some embarrassment among proud Russian officials. There were a lot of behind-the-scenes discussions about whether they were going to allow us to go forward or not. One faction of the government even put together its own proposal at the last minute to try to sabotage ours. But in the end, we prevailed.”

The following year, the government submitted its own successful proposal to the Global Fund for a similar amount, but focusing on HIV treatment, Veazey adds.

“Now things are starting to change. President Putin announced in a speech recently that he was ordering the government to increase its budget for AIDS by 20 times. Of course, we have to see what they actually do with this money, but the environment is sharply different from a few years ago,” he says.

A favorite aspect of his job is writing editorials and getting them published in newspapers such as the Kiev Post. Once, he criticized the European Union for not taking a big enough role in prevention; another time he admonished the U.S. government for advocating abstinence-only programs. The U.S. “essentially enforces abstinence because they offer a lot of money and people normally don’t refuse.”

Life in Moscow can be hectic. A native of Chattanooga, Tenn., Veazey has never grown used to living among so many people: “At 12 million people, Moscow is much bigger than New York. There are a lot of high rises, and the city has a kind of a grim exterior. There are a lot of reasons to be grim, because there’s so much poverty here.

Then there are the challenges of everyday life in a city where some modern conveniences have not quite caught on. Says Veazey, “the most annoying thing for a Westerner are small food shops called producty. You walk in and there are about four different counters for different kinds of goods and you have to ask each person for what you want, they weigh it and tell you how much it costs, you go back to the cashier and pay for it, you bring your receipt back, and you can get whatever you bought. Then, you have to do it over again at the other counters.”

Life in Moscow improved dramatically for Veazey in 2003, when he married Elena Rudykh, who works as an assistant network administrator. Elena’s family lives in Novosibirsk, in Siberia, and Veazey loves visiting the region. “Once you get outside the city, the countryside is beautiful, especially in winter, with birch trees and snow,” he says.

His favorite thing about Russia is the character of the people: good-natured in spite of a hard life, resilient, friendly—and devoted readers of great literature. “Everyone here has read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It’s pretty amazing,” he says.

Veazey and his wife are starting to think about moving back to the U.S., where Veazey would like to attend law school. He’s still interested in advocacy. “I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not going to save the world,” Veazey says. “It just feels good doing this kind of work, and I want to continue doing it.”

By Rosemary Harty

Back to The College table of contents
Back to top