After the Quake, Charity Is Dream Come True for AIDS Patients : Burbank: The president of Dreams to Reality has taken food, water and other supplies to many in the Valley who feel isolated after the disaster.

When the Northridge earthquake hit last week, Charles, a 30-year-old unemployed waiter who has AIDS, did what many throughout Los Angeles did.

He prayed.

“It’s an evil world,” he said to God as he clung to the doorway, sure that his shaking Los Feliz apartment was about to collapse. “But give us another chance.”

Most everyone did get another chance, but as the recovery from the earthquake has begun, the bouts of depression brought on by his disease have gotten worse for Charles. With no income--except from welfare--and reliant on a brother who has not been able to reach him, Charles was nearly out of food last week when Christopher Spencer came to visit.

Spencer, 24, co-founder and president of a small charity in Burbank, has been delivering bags of canned food, water and other supplies to Charles and others like him, those who had become double-victims--of both AIDS and natural disaster.

“A little bit of hope can go a long way,” said Spencer, president of the Dreams to Reality Foundation, a small charity started in Burbank last year. While doing other work, the organization focuses on raising money to combat AIDS.

Since he started his relief effort, Spencer has received calls from about 50 people who need help. They learned about him through public service announcements he placed with local radio and television stations.

A steady, dark-haired man, Spencer makes his deliveries in a silver Toyota Tercel with his groceries in the back and a cellular phone hanging from the rear-view mirror.

He owns a small office supply company in Burbank, and tries to get most of his work done in the mornings so he can do charity work in the afternoons.

On an afternoon earlier this week, he made eight deliveries, driving to North Hollywood, Canoga Park, Studio City and other points in the San Fernando Valley.

“I can’t pretend to know what it’s like to have AIDS,” Spencer said. “But I know (people with AIDS) want friendship, compassion and understanding. They need to feel like they can belong.”

AIDS experts make the point that while stress, lack of sleep, nervousness and depression may not be strangers to earthquake survivors, these feelings have long been companions to people with AIDS. Already, they have been forced to form an uncomfortable acceptance that they will die too young, and now even that disturbing reality has been shaken.

“They want things to be secure and familiar,” said Lorette Herman, director of client services for AIDS Project Los Angeles. The disease already forces too many changes in their lives, she said. “You want the earth to stop moving.”

Because of the earthquake, AIDS Project Los Angeles has established support groups for its clients to help them cope. Calls to the hot line jumped after the earthquake and the organization has tried to contact each of its 3,900 clients.

“Whenever you have an illness, a crisis makes everything worse,” Herman said. Because AIDS can manifest itself in so many different ways, the psychological effects of a crisis like the earthquake can also vary. Some patients may only worry about losing their medication as it spills in the darkness, others may have an eye disease that compounds the problems of a sudden earthquake-induced blackout, Herman said.

There are nearly 700 people with AIDS in the Valley, but AIDS groups do not have figures as to how many were affected by or made homeless by the earthquake. Patty Dailey of the Los Angeles Housing Exchange, which finds shelter or housing for people with AIDS or are HIV-positive, said the group has had three or four requests a day for help from earthquake victims.

Earthquake victims and AIDS patients do have something in common, said Julie Steres, the mental health coordinator at the Valley HIV Center. They both often feel helpless because they do not have control with what is happening to them. So the counseling may follow the same tack, but there the similarity ends.

“You don’t recover from AIDS,” Steres said. “You learn to live with it.”

Chad Bowen, a North Hollywood man who received food and a supply of rubber gloves from Spencer, said the earthquake was “the most devastating thing to happen to me since I found out I was (HIV) positive.” This was only the second earthquake for Owen, who is from Tennessee. He’s so disturbed by the continuing aftershocks that he no longer sleeps well, and is down to only one meal a day. The stress could easily take a toll on his already taxed immune system.

Owen’s partner, Patrick Lyman, who also has AIDS, has been trying to keep his friend’s spirits up, keeping him away from drinking, which would further wreck his immune system. The couple plan to commit to each other in a marriage ceremony later this year.

For Tim Kopischke, a 28-year-old Hollywood man who tested positive for the HIV virus in July, 1991, the earthquake meant losing 30 pounds of frozen venison his father had killed for him in Minnesota. He had been counting on using that meat, and because he has not had steady employment for more than two years, Kopischke, who is healthy but must take care of his 3-year-old daughter who has AIDS, only had about $4 when he heard that there was help available.

Spencer delivered juice, canned chili, soup and diapers for the baby, Amy, whose mother died almost a year ago from AIDS.

“I think I’ve done it all now,” said Kopischke, who listed among his life experiences living on the streets, working in construction, traveling cross country, having one wife leave him and another die of AIDS--and now earthquakes.

“There’s not a damn thing you can do about it, either one of them--the earthquake or the AIDS,” said Kopischke.

He said the earthquake has brought his neighbors a bit closer, helping to remove some of the isolation he has felt from being HIV-positive.

But the earthquake has taken away the sense of belonging for the handful of AIDS victims who have been forced out of their homes or apartments. Cheryl Kauffman, a family case manager in the Valley HIV Center in Van Nuys, predicted that one of her clients, a single mother of four, would take a turn for the worse as a result of the quake’s trauma.

Kauffman said a volunteer worker with AIDS came into her office the day after the earthquake, shaking with distress.

“He wanted a hug, but he hadn’t had a shower in two days,” said Kauffman, who hugged him. “He was shaking like a scared animal.”

The earthquake, which struck about 4:30 a.m. Jan. 17, found Charles, the former waiter, awake--despite the early hour. He had been watching television news, a frequent middle-of-the-night activity for him because of the cycle of night sweats, lack of sleep, depression and anxiety. He likes television news because he does not have the mental concentration to watch anything for too long.

The violent shaking threw him out of the bed.

“That was my first feeling of God in a long time,” Charles said. “I felt that the hand of God had touched people in a way that they had better wake up and realize how precious life is.”