AIDS Workshop

Okay people I'm doing what I said I would, playing catch up. But here's the deal, ya'll need to start commenting more.

So AIDS "officially" has not touched Benin as much as it has many other African countries. Last records report 2-3% of the population is infected, however, most of believe these number to not be accurate. I have a couple reasons why I do not believe these "official" numbers. One is that there is a huge stigma attached to AIDS tests here so many people are still not getting them. Life is easier for them if they don't know if they have it or not. Another factor is the doing the test itself. More and more health centers are offering it but not all of them so those people who live out in the brush will never be tested. Another reason I feel these numbers are false is that all of the neighboring countries have significantly higher AIDS rates than we do. Benin does not have some protective bubble around it protecting it from this disease, especially considered how much crossing boarders does happen.

But anyway, even if these numbers were correct the best way to keep them low was to keep educating the population, keep teaching them how to prevent getting sick in the first place. I had been doing mini lectures on HIV to the girls in my girls club but I wanted to get to a wider range of people, especially boys. Because fidelity is an unheard of concept here I wanted to reach out to the young men in my community and teach them how to protect themselves and thus others from HIV. I decided to organize a two day workshop focusing on HIV/AIDS, what it is, how you can get it and what you can do to prevent it. I worked with 40 students, 20 boys and 20 girls. I asked volunteers to come up and help me do this workshop. I knew that a topic such as this could not be discussed all together, I needed to divide the group girls with me and the other female volunteers and the boys with the male volunteers. It was touch and go for awhile if I would even have male volunteers comming up to help. Out of the three originally asked two backed out thankfully on the day of the workshop a new volunteer to the region had come by to visit and was willing to stay and help out.

The activities I had originally planned on were to last for a day and a half, with the end of day two for review and getting the students involved by having them give presentations over the information. Well, I underestimated how much the kids already knew and we flew through the information for both days in day one. I was paniking at this point. What was I going to do for day two? I had already arranged for the kids to be out of school so I had to do something with them. But it was obvious by their behavior that we couldn't continue as planned or they would have revolted out of boredom. I was also in a tizzy that day because the lunch that I had arranged to come never did. I had asked a woman who makes and sells lunch to come and do so for my children. She said no problem and because this lady is my friend I believed her. Because I was busy the day before the workshop I was unable to go back an remind my friend to make the rice but I hoped she would remember because we had just talked about it the day before. Well she didn't remember. Thankfully my friends were there running the workshop for me so that I could be free to take care of the smaller details like providing food to all the participants. It was probably better that way anyway my friends have better french than I do. But anyway back to the workshop.

So we did several activies with the students. The first one entailed talking about our body parts. Since we were going to be spending 2 days talking about sex I thought we should familiarize

ourselves with the various terms used for our body parts. The idea behind it was that there is only one word for arm yet how many for penis? Also kids here have no idea what masterbation is. It was one of the terms we were to discuss but none of them had even heard of it before so we let it drop. We got them using condoms. For many of the students this was the first time they had ever seen or touched one. We taught them how to correctly use and dispose of them. We also wanted them to see how strong condoms are so we blew a bunch of them up and put questions inside. We then played hot potatoe and whoever had the condom last had to break it and answer the question inside. It was a lot harder than what they thought it would be to do this, but it was great to watch.

We did another activity where students took two dice that had the names of four fluids that transmit HIV and two that do not. The student then had to role the dice and explain what situation would put the two fluids that came up together. For example if one dice said breast milk and another dice said saliva, you could said during breast feeding these two liquids would be in contact with each other and that the person is at risk for catching HIV. The picture to the left show me with the two dice I made. The other white girl is Jaren, a friend/volunteer who came up to help me with this workshop.

Because we went through the activities so fast I was a little freaked out as I said earlier about what to do day two. I wanted these kids to be peer educators so in order for them to do that I wanted to work with them on how they would share this information with others. Day two was spent doing this. We divided them into four group, each group was responsible for different information. One did transmittion, one prevention, one condoms and one risky behaviors each group was asked to find some way to share their knowledge of their topic with the rest of us. The first time around they were horrendous. Their lack of general knowlege on how to do presentations would shame even an elementary school child. During round one basically each group got in front of the class and made one kid do all the talking while they just stood there looking at the ground, and the one kids who was doing the talking was doing so by reading directly from a piece of paper. After two groups proceeded to do exactly this we stopped them and gave them some feed back and what we wanted and expected. Basically everyone had to talk/particpate. We wanted some sort of introduction as to who they were and what they were going to talk about. We took a break then to give each group time to regroup and rework what they were going to present. It was awsome to see some kids really work at this and make their presentation awsome. Others, I was sad to see used this time to nap instead. The next round went so much better. This time most had come up with some sort of skit to prensent their information. However there were still the problem of not everyone participating and also when presenting information to group it is necessary to speak towards them not with your back towards them. Also covering their mouth with there hand while talking was a common problem. So with that feedback we sent them back to work on their skits. This final time I was blown away by 2 out of the four groups. There were two that worked so hard and you could tell. The other two, well one just didn't care and you could tell. They didn't apply any of the feedback or instructions we had given them and still had only one or two people out of the group doing all the talking. The other group I felt really bad for because they tried to please us and each time they did better than the time before but in the end they still sucked.

And so that was my AIDS workshop. It was stressful but it was a good learning experience for them and for me. The lessons learned from it have definetly helped me in my current work.

Here is a picture of everyone who participated day two. Can you find the white people? It's like playing were's Waldo. :)

So I said a couple posts back that I would try and catch you all up on my comming and goings during those months when I didn't post, so here is my first attempt.

So I was lucky enough to participate in two Thanksgiving dinners this year. The first first of which was the unplanned one. Thanksgiving fell not long after a two days AIDS workshop I had held in my village (I will talk about this in another post) and so I was busy running around trying to wrap up everything for that as well as get things ready for Thanksgiving dinner. Because I had to go down to Parakou to make some color prints (how sad that the closest color printer to me is four hours away, but that's another can of worms) I said that I would also pick up veggies while I was there. (Again how sad that I have to travel 4 hours to get vegetables) I wasn't looking forward to the trip but it's a necessary evil and I veiwed it as such. I don't remember why but I ended up going down with Noel instead of taking a taxi. I thought going with Noel in a Peace Corps vehicle the trip shouldn't take no time at all. WRONG! We made so many stops along the way that the normal 4 hour trip ended up taking around 7! By the time we rolled into Parakou it was already getting dark and I had about a half hour to get to the store and pick up some of the things I needed. My plan had originally been to get back up to my post after buying all the stuff the same day because I had to work the following morning, however getting into Parakou so late threw that plan out the window. However also saying in Parakou at this time were all the TFL volunteer (english teachers) they were all together for a Peace Corps training which happend to fall during Thanksgiving so they were using the workstation to fix dinner. And what a wonderful dinner it was too. Turkey legs, fruit salad, green bean casserole and so much more that i have forgotten by now. The next day I woke up early enough to finish all the work I had come to Parakou to do and then catch a taxi back up to Kandi to celebrate what came to be my second Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving last year was amazing and it was mostly due to the work of the older volunteers. They had planned ahead and asked their familys back home in America to send the "traditional" foods associated with Thanksgiving. This year we wanted to make Thanksgiving as nice for the new volunteers as the older volunteers made it for us last year. So between Meagan, Alex and I we asked our families to send us the things we each felt we needed to have a great Thanksgiving. Meagan took care of the stuffing and pecan pie, Alex found and cooked the turkey and thanks to my wonderful family I was able to provide the pumpkin and cherry pies as well as cranberry sauce.

Here I am after making the pumpkin pie, I am about to put into the oven.

Ryan and Alex were in charge of the turkey this year.

Me showing off part of our delicious dinner.