My HIV Training at the Local Health Center

Ever since I arrived in my site I have wanted to do a training with the local health center. When I first got my Peace Corps nomination, I was told that I was going to go do HIV work in sub-saharan Africa. That's not exactly where I ended up. Working in primary schools with kindergarten through sixth graders I don't get a lot of opportunities to give HIV trainings, although I have given HIV trainings to high school students. I am a Healthy Schools Volunteer and since school is not in session, I have to get a little creative so that I stay busy. So I planned this HIV workshop for everyone who works at the Health Center in my town. This included: doctors, nurses, students, and people doing their practicum. I repeated the same workshop on two different days so that half of the health center staff participated the first day and the other half the second day and the Health Center could remain open.

I started the workshop out with a short quiz to see how much they already knew about HIV and advanced HIV (which is the new term that is replacing AIDS). After that we did the "street talk" activity where I put up posters with the words: penis, arm, testicles, breasts written at the top of each paper and it was their job to go around and write down all of the slang words that are used in place of these words. The point is that there are a lot of slang words for all of the aforementioned words except for arm and how important it is for them as health officials and teachers to use the correct words. It also helps to get people giggling and to open up a little. Up next was the TeachAIDS health education animated tutorial video which is a great resource for teaching about HIV to any age group. I obviously showed the Spanish version. If you have 20 spare minutes and need a refresher on HIV transmission and prevention it's worth a watch. I followed this with the basic information on transmission, prevention, etc. Then we got to the good part. They paired up, picked an activity from the Peace Corps HIV manual, and presented it to the rest of the group. This way they got to see all of the activities in the manual as well as practice presenting the new information. Below are some pictures of the Health Center workers presenting the HIV activities in front of the group.

Condom demonstration

"101 ways to love someone" (without having sex)

Finally I passed out the post-test and diplomas. I am happy to report that there was a great improvement on the test. I was so happy that they agreed to let me do this training. They didn't have to, but they came, were present, and learned!

Diplomas! Yes her name is correctly spelled as Bilma. With a B.

Day 1

Day 2