Global Handwashing Day, HIV/AIDS Workshops and World AIDS Day!

---

Hello! It has been a very busy and exciting few months in Takoradi, I have a lot to share so here it goes...

Each year on October 15th, over 200 million people are involved in celebrations in over 100 countries around the world; this is Global Handwashing Day. Diarrhea kills more people than AIDS, malaria and measles put together; handwashing with soap is the most effective and inexpensive way to prevent diarrheal & acute respiratory infections, which take the lives of millions of children in developing countries. Together, they are responsible for the majority of all child deaths. Together with the staff and students at the YMCA, we discussed the importance of washing your hands and the benefits it will have on the entire community. To demonstrate just how easily germs can be spread we chose a few volunteers and asked them to dip their hands into a bag of flower and then to shake as many peoples hands as they could. After the excitment and chatter stopped, we asked the entire audience to raise their hand if they had flower on their hand...almost everyone in the room put up their hand. This visual really helped to show how germs can be spread and why it is so important to wash your hands. We also demonstrated how germs can be spread through air by the same flower concept and an overdramatic sneeze; that got a lot of laughs! By the end of the day we were able to speak about the seriousness of the issue and by handing out handwashing kits to each person (which consisted of a bar of soap, a hand towel and a bottle of hand sanitizer) everyone was very excited to wash their hands!

The remainder of our work here will be centered on HIV/AIDS education. We spent some time developing a "train the trainer" workshop on HIV/AIDS focusing on what it is, what it does to our bodies, transmission and prevention. Our original plan was to facilitate the workshop with the YMCA staff so they would be aware of what we are talking about with the students (which is usual protocol for all of our workshops we give), however we tried something different which was a huge success. Unfortunately the students have a hard time understanding us, although everyone speaks english, we do speak very fast for them as well as have a heavy accent. To address this issue, as well as to give the students a chance to build up some leadership skills, we choose a group of about 15 students who we facilitated the workshop for, who then were asked to split into groups and develop their own HIV/AIDS workshops based on what they learned and present it to their fellow classmates. After doing the workshop with the group of 15 we realized how much education they lacked on the subject, and how many misconceptions there are about the issue. One of the toughest points to get accross was the fact that HIV cannot be transmitted through food, which is a very common myth that has very serious reprecussions dealing with employing people who are HIV positive. After seeing my group present their workshop to the class, I was so proud to see that they understood and learned the information and were able to put it into local context for their workshop. It was a great success!

Much of our time and effort is going towards the planning of the World AIDS Day event we are holding on Novemeber 21st. Although World AIDS Day is celebrated on December 1st, it has been pushed forward due to the presidential elections happening on December 7th. We have invited the community and surrounding schools and are hoping to have a turn out of about 300 people. The event will take place in a church court yard and will be set up as a fair; available throughout the day will be a nurse where one can get a health check up and free HIV testing, a nutritionist and an information booth on transmission and prevention. As well we are planninng to have some guest speakers (people living with HIV) to talk about their experience and to show that you can live a full and happy life while being HIV positive. Our main event will be a cook-off;groups of people living with and without HIV will cook to show that in cannot be transmitted through food, our hope is that this will help to reduce the stigma around the disease.

Thats all for now, even though I've only got a couple of weeks left I will try and update after World AIDS day to let you know how it went! love and miss you all xox

---