What's New?

Lisa JONES!

Lisa JONES! finally came to visit my village and it was such a joy to have her there. We had been talking about it for ages. Lisa is working with an NGO in Lusaka and we became friends almost two years ago. We connected on the fact that we both had family from the Caribbean, hers from Jamaica, mine from Barbados, and we were both African Americans in Zambia (which is quite unusual sad to say). She has been my travel buddy and a friend to lean on and confide in. I'm so glad she's here, and am so sad that she is leaving in two months.

I had a meeting with my village counterparts during her visit so I invited her as a guest lecturer. She educated them on how Anti-Retroviral Treatment works in the body and on HIV transmission.

She also came baring gifts to the children in my village and they were so delighted.

Here they are with their new pencils, pens and other goodies.

We also went orange picking at a neighbor's place.

HIV Peer Educators

I trained 25 new HIV Peer Educators in my village. And I made them these lovely certificates which were signed by the District Commissioner and myself. People here really dig certificates. The training lasted for three days, the participants camped at NAPS training center and I commuted on my bike daily. The training included education on HIV transmission, prevention, correct condom use, how to conduct condom demonstration, male and female anatomy, how the reproductive system works, basic counseling skills and much more. I'm very proud of my trainees and they all developed workplans to start implementing in their respective areas. People came from as far as 30km away.

There were also some fun activities involved such as condom races where one group had to race the other group to see who could complete putting on a condom CORRECTLY and the fastest on a penis model.

The GRADUATES!

HIV Support Groups

The HIV Support Group meetings are beginning to be a bit overwhelming. I cycled about 20km out to this place in the mountains (where they allegedly have monkeys although I didn't see any on the way) to help facilitate an HIV support meeting. Now these groups are supposed to be small but there were about 180 people there. This area apparently doesn't get a lot of visitors, so we took the oppotunity to do some basic HIV education there were people argued with me that they wouldn't eat with an HIV infected person because of the fear of having the HIV transmitted through the food. It made me think of how much more work I still have to do.

Working with UN organizations FAO and WFP

I've also managed to connect one of the communties to an Farmer Field Life School sponsored by two UN organiztions FAO (Food Agriculture Organization) and WFP (World Food Programme). The purpose of the school is to build the capacity of communities to develop income through agriculture projects and to increase food security for their families and the greater community. We just completed a training with 3 other group to give facilitators the skills they need to teach the communities. This is the entire group trained:

And here are my community facilitators and me (with a bad hair day).