December 1st, 2011
To celebrate World AIDS Day (December 1st), Addy and I held our last Health Club meeting for the year on November 30th (The school year ended this week and summer vacation will go until end of January). School was not actually in session that day but we met with six members of our Health Club and had a poster making party. Each member created their-own slogan about HIV prevention and designed a poster. They were very creative and come up with some great posters to decorate our meeting room.
Addy was offered a great opportunity for a University professor from the University of Swaziland to come and film our Health Club. He is a Fulbright Scholar from America who is teaching a film class at the university. He is putting together a documentary on how people in Africa are promoting HIV prevention. He asked to film our Health Club and will be coming early December.
We spent the rest of our meeting (which, ended up being 5 hours long) preparing a drama (a skit) to perform for the filming; the drama is about the importance of being faithful and not having multiple concurrent partners. In a traditional polygamist society, like Swaziland, having multiple partners at once is what makes a “real” man, its one of the hardest behavior changes to overcome here.
We asked the students if they also wanted to sing a song for the filming and out of nowhere they composed one about protecting yourself by wearing a condom. The main chorus says “uvikela ngecondom,” which means protect your self, with a condom. It was fantastic and then they decided that they wanted to each say their slogan they had created for their posters within the song. I was soooo impressed and proud of them. I took a video of them practicing because its so great and I am trying to get it uploaded for all of you to hear.
HAPPY WORLD AIDS DAY!!
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