World AIDS Day

This one is a little old. I'm trying to catch up on some blog entries.

December 1 was World AIDS Day. I wanted to have a celebration in my village. So I set up a football tournament (with the help of my clinic officer) to have the championship game play on World AIDS Day and all the other games played the proceeding weeks. Then I went to the school asking them to work on several skits and traditional dancing. Then I was going to do some health talks with my counterpart Gilbert. I wanted all the entertainment to come from the village. To show them that this celebration is something that they are able to do in future years. My village also had a few VCT (Voluntary Counseling and Testing) counselors to do HIV testing. The event was going to take place on Sunday 1 December in the afternoon, after church.

The day of the event things didn't go as smoothly as planned. The two teams that won the semifinals showed up....then two more. Turns out that due to communication problems two other teams showed up ready to play. So we had to completely change the program and squeeze in two football games instead of one. Then only the traditional dancers showed up from the school so no skits were done.  Then my counterpart finally let me know that he was playing in the football tournament and didn't want to do the health talks because he was worried that if he had done the health talks and his team won people would claim that there was fowl play.

I quickly found a new translator and gave a few health talks and tried to make sure people knew why this event was happening. Then I was busy checking up on everything: the counselors, traditional dancing, and football tournament. Despite the challenges things went smoothly and I heard a lot of positive feedback from my villagers.