Raising Awareness on World AIDS Day!

I worked with my school psychologist to organize a small project at our school to help raise awareness for HIV/AIDS on World AIDS day, which is the first of December. As a member of the Peace Corps Ukraine HIV/AIDS working group, I am very passionate about educating Ukrainian youth about HIV/AIDS and especially trying to reduce stigma and discrimination by teaching accurate information about prevention and transmission. In Russian, World AIDS day is called День Борьбы со СПИДом, which translates to Day of Solidarity. Here is the poster that I drew and the true/false statistics that I prepared for school.

Translation - "Day of Solidarity: Overcoming HIV/AIDS and leading the world!"

True facts are in red and the false facts are in blue. 

Together with the help of some of the 10th form girls, we presented some basic information about HIV/AIDS statistics and passed out the little booklets and flyers in Ukrainian and Russian to the students. The students from the 10th form attended a training several years ago about HIV/AIDS when the previous Peace Corps volunteer was at my school.

with the girls from 10th form. 

Some 9th form girls with the booklets. 

We also held a poster contest and asked each class to draw a poster, we will use some of the winning designs in our AIDS memorial mural (to be painted in the spring as part of my PEPFAR project). There was a surprising number of poster entries from the 5th-7th form classes, I am glad that they already have some knowledge about HIV/AIDS!

The boys from the 5b class and their posters. 

with the girls from the 5a class. 

with the girls from the 5b class. 

Okay, so 5th graders love taking photos.

with 11th form girls.

11th formers with our school psychologist. 

December is shaping up to be a really busy month for me, project wise... my sitemate and I have a weekend leadership camp planned for next weekend and then my best friend from middle school is coming to visit me the week after that! I'm currently in the process of writing a SPA grant for a Journalism club at my school and I'm also writing the partnership grant for Camp HEAL next summer, a camp about HIV/AIDS education, human trafficking, healthy lifestyles and leadership. I'll post the link to the grants once they are finished :)