Part of our role as a Peace Corps Volunteer is to educate our villages about other sectors, and HIV/AIDS… meaning that as an environment volunteer I could do a latrine building project or a nutrition project. Many volunteers that aren’t education volunteers find themselves teaching in schools, and teachers try to incorporate food security by building a school garden, etc. Our assigned projects may have something more specific with our assigned sectors, but really we can do any work that we think our village needs. In our initial training that takes place our first three months in country we generally learn about our sector though (for me that was environment). There has now been two groups to come in after I came to Ghana and the training has changed a bit… meaning they are getting specific HIV/AIDS training during their 3 months training rather than later on in their service. As part of their HIV/AIDS training they are sent to a PCV who volunteers to host some new trainees to give them hands on HIV/AIDS experience in doing a village project.

I opted to host some new trainees to help me with an HIV/AIDS project in my village because it was time I hit upon the required HIV/AIDS education that we are suppose to give (I did give a small HIV/AIDS education class to one of the churches, but only about 50 people came, and I was trying to educate the younger generation this time). 2 trainees (who had only been in country about a month) ventured to my site to help me work with the Junior High School (JHS) students to raise HIV/AIDS (and other STI’s) awareness.

all the Roman Catholic school children crammed into one classroom

In two days we went to two JHS schools, raising HIV/AIDS awareness for about 200 students. We started at the District Assembly’s School (also known as public school) with about an hour long question answer session… we asked the questions and when we called upon a kid to answer the question and they got it right they got a piece of candy (to get people to answer questions or even attend a meeting it’s always god to have a bribing mechanism.) We asked the obvious questions… “What is an STD?” “What is HIV?” “What is AIDS?” “How can one contract HIV/AIDS?” “What are the 3 methods of prevention in terms of it being a sexually transmitted disease?” ”Can HIV/AIDS kill?”… And we got the not so obvious answers back… “You will get HIV/AIDS by sharing a drink with someone who has it.” “Sharp objects is the main way to contract HIV/AIDS.”

one student holding up a picture explaining how he/she will

prevent themselves form getting HIV/AIDS

From the question portion we broke out into 3 groups and each individually led an interactive game to reiterate what actions are high risk vs. low risk to contracting the virus, the 3 ways to prevent getting any STI (sexually transmitted infection… it’s what they say here), and a risky behavior game.

The last portion of our HIV/AIDS (and other STI’s) awareness day we divided the boys and girls up to answer questions that they might not want to ask in front of each other. The girls were rather shy to ask anything, but the boys were having a hay day with questions.

getting the students involved in HIV/AIDS education