Community HIV Semimar

As part of our efforts to provide HIV/AIDS education to the community of Lenana we held a seminar at the school, one Saturday in September. The seminar was intended to focus on awareness, answer questions and dispel some of the misconceptions surrounding the issue in Kenya, prevention and encourage people to get tested and know their status. We spend quite a bit of time preparing for the day, we designed posters highlighting key HIV facts which can be used at future seminars and when volunteers talk to schools in the area. We also prepared a hand out for the attendees to take home and hopefully share with other people, it talked about HIV in Kenya, treatment, prevention and testing.

The day went really well. Teachers from the school setup tents in the courtyard so the audience wasn’t too hot and we provided tea and light snacks to lure them in. About 60 odd people turned up which we were very happy with as not too much promotion had been done, most of them were women as we expected, but 15 or so men did turn up, and were very involved in the conversations, and encouraging of what we were doing, and of people to take more responsibility within the community.

We got some tough questions and had some heated discussions. It seems sex is an embarrassing issue for both parents and teachers to speak to the kids about, so no one really talks to them about it, and the children miss out on important information, stuff that in Kenya, could really save their lives. So we spoke about the importance to communication and how it can help break down the stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS in Kenya. During the section about prevention we had one of the Tumaini ladies get up and give a quick demonstration of a female condom which the ladies found particularly interesting, she explained how
it works and also that if you put it in 30mins before sex the men (particularly drunk ones) don’t even notice it. Other questions like what happens when a baby is born HIV positive and then is tested again a year later and is negative or how come my first born is HIV positive and my second isn’t? Thankfully as a group we were able to answer all of these.

One of the topics I spoke about was the issue of concurrency, where people have multiple concurrent sexual relationships for an extended period of time. This creates a network of people, and when they have unprotected sex (which most people do) then HIV can spread rapidly throughout the network, infecting even faithful partners. Concurrency is one of the biggest reasons why HIV is such a large issue in this part of the world, it’s like everyone thinks their partner will be faithful, and HIV is someone else’s problem. With Free condoms, free testing and free treatment, Kenya has all the tools to fight HIV, but the rate is still rising.

Probably the bit of the day which had the most impact for the audience was when each of the Tumaini ladies got up and told their stories. How they felt when they first knew their status, how their families reacted (many have been ostracized) and how they live their life now and are healthy. The women we’re able to open up and really get the message home in Swahili, rather than everything we said being translated from English.

To close out the day we reminded people of the importance of getting tested and being responsible, that HIV is not just a problem for poor people, that the community must work together to help in the fight against HIV and AIDS in Kenya.