Hello again to all of our family and friends. Jess and I just got finished with a spectacular project, so we´d like to take this blog post to fill you all in on our recent activities.
A few years back President Bush created the “President´s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief,” more lovingly known as PEPFAR. The program makes funds available throughout the developing world to fight the spread of HIV. Here in Nicaragua, Peace Corps was given the charge of managing these funds and tasked its volunteers to spending the money on HIV prevention. So, in July of these year our group of health volunteers were asked by our program director, Pilar, to put together a few PEPFAR workshops around the country. Jess and I were grouped with the volunteers in the northern departments of Jinotega, Matagalpa, Nueva Segovia, and Madríz (ours). That made a total of 9 volunteers working on this one workshop.
As a group we decided on the date, time, location, content, and participants. Probably the easiest decision of all of these was the content, as we knew we needed to focus in HIV. As for participants, we were told there was a budget for a total of 50, but that was just the beginning. Should we work with men? Should we work with midwives? Should we work with nurses? Finally, we agreed that we would each invite 4 youths between the ages of 15 and 20 to participate. We went back and forth on the date because, believe it or not, any closer to November and we would lose a lot of participants to the coffee harvest. Any earlier and we would have trouble meshing with the bean planting season. We were able to find a compromise during the week of October 6th. The location was up in the air for weeks to come as volunteers scoured for locales that could accommodate 50 people with lodging, food, and meeting space, all for under $15 a day per person. We settled on a hotel in Estelí for it´s central location, charming atmosphere, and rock bottom prices.
So now, that the particulars were sorted out, we went back to the content, which is of course the whole reason we´re having the workshop. We have all worked on HIV prevention in our site, so it was clear from the start that our participants would already be familiar with the theme. We had to come up with something different and exciting that would really help the message stick with our youth. Jess and I thought it would be great to do an all night “lock-in” event with tons of sugar and activities to keep people awake and excited. We lobbied hard for the idea and the whole group got on board. Since the workshop would be three days, we decided to hold the lock in the first night, let the kids sleep well the following night so we could send them back to their parents more or less recovered.
A few other volunteers thought an all night event was a ridiculous idea since half of these kids don´t stay up past 7:30pm due to no electricity in the house. In retrospect, they were probably right, but we settled on 7 hours of activity between 8pm and 3am. Jess and I were put in charge of the planning and we came up with 5 hour long activities with 20 minute side activities buffering each main session. We designed each session around HIV-AIDS, to be sure the kids understood the information. Our sessions had the following themes:
Casino Night
Olympics
Jeopardy
Fashion Show
Channel X
In Casino Night, the Peace Corps volunteers dressed the room up like a classy casino, down to us in white shirts and bowties. We had 4 different casino games focused on HIV. I ran the roulette table where participants could win or lose chips based on their actions. For instance, the wheel had a spot for abstinence, which paid out 4 times the bet. Another spot, “sex with a prostitute” left the player without any of his chips. I put the game together without every actually having played roulette and my table was paying out loads, but the other tables had the house winning, so it all evened out in the end.
At another table we had a craps style game, where students rolled the dice to find out how safe the behaviors were. Low rolls meant abstinence, fidelity, and always using protection. High rolls meant promiscuity, not using protection, and risk of getting HIV.
We also had a card game and a board game going. The Casino Night was a big success and will probably be expanded in time and tables in the future. We´ll see.
In the Olympics we had in the sack races (your normal sack race) and condom tosses (like water balloon toss, except with condoms). The participants paired off and competed in each activity. In the end we had gold tuna cans for medals. It was all very competitive.
The Jeopardy session was exactly as it sounds, only with questions about HIV as opposed to random trivia. We split 10 volunteers into two groups and they competed in front of the “live studio audience” of the other participants.
Kory, a volunteer from Matagalpa, even built little bells out of bamboo and old telephone ringers to that the kids would have something to smack when they thought of the answer. We were all surprised and impressed with the amount of knowledge these kids already had. Perhaps we´ll post some of the questions up here and see how all of you do…In the fashion show activity we gave 5 different groups a bunch of old second hand clothes. They had to create three distinct outfits (men´s formalwear, women´s formalwear, and casualwear). Next we held a fashion show with dance music and spotlights (flashlights) and three judges. Neither Jess´s nor my group won the fashion show, but that´s life.
For the last activity of the night, Channel X, we had the students create 30 second TV commercials about HIV. We borrowed a video camera and actually recorded them, too. Here´s one of the better ones:
Throughout the night we had different side activities going as well, which included the painting of a mural, which went to the highest scoring community and a photo booth. Our Peace Corps buddies Heather and Kory made some awesome backgrounds for the photo booth, and Jess and I brought different dress up props. The photos ended up pretty funny. Here's a few, the first is Jess with two of the girls she brought.
Besides the lock-in we covered the information in more traditional ways throughout the 3 days. We were also lucky enough to have an HIV positive Nicaraguan participate for the whole workshop. Frank worked with the kids for two full days as “an HIV expert” and didn´t reveal he was HIV positive until the 2nd evening. His story is very powerful and had a profound effect on the kids. Frank has known he has HIV for 7 years now and only found out when his wife died of tuberculosis brought on by AIDS. He has always been heterosexual and never taken any intravenous drugs. Basically, he was unfaithful with his wife and most likely brought HIV into his family. Since the death of his wife he travels around Nicaragua telling his story to groups like ours. When he´s not speaking he is raising his two kids, who still don´t know he is HIV positive or how their mother died…
So, that was our PEPFAR workshop in a nutshell. Personally, I was not that interested in HIV prevention before Peace Corps, but it really is important – even in the U.S. If anyone would like to hear more about specific activities or has specific HIV related questions, please leave a comment and we´ll do our best to answer.
Again, thanks for reading!
