Charlas

About a month ago, a school called and asked us to do HIV education presentations for all of its seventh- and eighth-graders, so two weeks ago, we went and spent a whole day repeating our VIH Charla presentation for various groups. The room was dark (no electricity) and way over-crowded with about 65 students for each presentation. (I tried to get a couple pictures, but it was just too dark.) We were hot and crowded, but we pressed on and gave five presentations to the (mostly) well-behaved and engaged middle schoolers.




In this picture, Anita is prepping a volunteer skit group. The signs they are wearing are different illnesses (Tos = cough and Fiebre = fever, though there are others signs for diarrhea and itchy rash too) and the skit compares what happens when these illnesses attack a healthy person´s immune system with what happens when they attack an HIV-infected person´s immune system. Kids get really into this skit, and it´s a good, simple illustration of how HIV works in the body.


Here, Anita uses colored water in different bottles to indicate what happens when a group of young men (in a land far, far away) visit an HIV-infected promiscuous woman in ¨the big city¨ and then marry and are loyal to different women later in life. At the end, the bottles are unveiled as the kids predict which ones are infected with red-colored HIV-water and which are not. Only the boy who did not go with his friends to visit the promiscuous woman - and consequently, his wife - are uninfected.

These skits pepper a (battery-powered) power-point presentation with information on HIV symptoms, how it´s spread, how it´s not spread, how to protect yourself, etc. It´s hard information to present to groups as young as seventh- and eighth-graders, who get antsy and somewhat hysterical around any topic related to sex, but I think these groups learned a lot, and it really is important to educate earlier rather than later.

I also got to spend some time outside during recess:







That´s it for now! Love to everyone!