Happy World AIDS Day Eve

As part of PST, all of the health trainees have had to work with one of five community groups throughout training to develop a final project to be done at the end of training. I was working with a community group of people living with HIV/AIDS, and today, we carried out our final project as part of World AIDS Day (December 1). We went to a local high school with a banner we had made that said (in French): “Protect yourself. Don’t be scared to get tested.” The banner had a picture of one person looking nervous and anxious on the left with question marks are around her head. On the right, we drew a picture of several people dancing together, some with a “+” above their head and some with a “-” above their head. Our community group had identified several messages as important to get across: 1) that people who were HIV+ and people who were HIV- needed to work together to reduce discrimination in the community; and 2) that it was important for people to know their status so that they could then begin to take care of themselves properly if they were HIV+ and they could continue to avoid contracting HIV if they were HIV-.

This banner was meant to illustrate these ideas – that people who are seropositive and seronegative can live and work together happily, and that people who know their status (whatever that status may be) are able to live happier, healthier lives. Below the poster, we had a blank space and we wrote above it, “I promise to live positively with everyone without discrimination.” When we were at the high school today, we asked students to sign it, and after they signed it, we gave them a pamphlet about HIV that we had made. Meanwhile, another group of trainees had worked with a health club in the high school itself, and they led some animations, or activities which were meant to teach about HIV – and many people in the high school participated in those.

I have been dreading this for awhile, because I thought it would be disastrous, but it turned out surprisingly well. For some reason, prior to this, I expected that animations here would be a lot more challenging than any similar work I’d done in the US – they’d have to be really well planned to do any good; furthermore, I thought that they wouldn’t be any good if they didn’t reach or impact a majority of the audience. I’m also accustomed to learning taking place in a classroom, according to a set schedule and set times. However, today, we came during the high school’s lunch break and did this (what seemed like very random) AIDS day animation, and the events turned out not just okay, but pretty well. While to me, it’s really bizarre to go and do animations about HIV during students’ lunch period, it’s actually not that crazy here.
I think this was an important lesson for me, because it helped me realize that my work here won’t be so different from my work with Peer Health Exchange. When doing peer education with PHE, I always knew that any time we taught a workshop, we were probably only really reaching a minority of students – some students just don’t care and aren’t that interested. That’s okay, though, because you teach for that minority of students who do care, who do learn, and who, in turn, make the world a slightly better place. Today, I learned that the same was true here. While I know that not everyone understood everything that happened today, some kids may have learned something or thought about HIV in a different way.

I’ll close with an anecdote that made me happy. A current volunteer has been here this week, helping us out with our final community group projects, and she said she heard two girls at the high school talking to each other about our banner. One girl asked the other what the banner was all about. The second girl replied, “well if you sign it, it means that if you get tested and you have HIV, we can still be friends.”