December = AIDS awareness month

Trying not to struggle through my Spanish...

My counterpart, Brenda and I

My Health Promoters and all the spectators right before the icebreaker!

The ribbons I gave to my health promoters during the workshop.

In honor of the 1st of December, I gave an HIV/AIDS workshop for my health promoters. I involved my counterpart, Brenda who is the rural health technician in my health center and my sitemate, Valerie.

Like many of my health presentations, you never know what to expect. Due to the lack of available space at my health center the meetings are normally held outside. This happened to be the case for this workshop. Well, for about the first 20 minutes of my workshop there were at least 70 people watching (people off the street, people waiting for consults)- we were pretty popular - which made the first icebreaker with my health promoters pretty hilarious:

The icebreaker is to get the participants confortable with the topic of the workshop, since we will be talking about sex, condoms, penis, vagina, homosexulaity, etc. The icebreaker is called "I wash my fruit" and starts with one person repeating a dialogue that we give them about how they wake up in the morning and 'clean themselves' so-to-speak. The dialogue goes like this in Enlgish: When I wake up, I wash my face, I wash my hands, and I wash my _____ (insert a type of fruit and the fruit represents a part of your body). So I said "peaches" and I pretended to wash my boobs :) Well.... when you have 70 people watching you, you can imagine the amount of laughter. People used banana as their penis, grapes as their scrotum, strawberries as their breasts, watermelon for their butt... it was so funny, they had a great time.

Overall, the workshop was a success. They were really motivated to try and get groups together in their community to participate in the same workshop. So I challenged them when we come back to meet again after the new year to give me at least one group that would be interested in hearing this workshop. So I am crossing my fingers that they pull through, I would love to stay busy and it would be amazing to spread the importance of HIV/AIDS education! Go Health Promoters!