Support Group

After a break on Monday from all the rain, we headed to the centre on Tuesday for a planning session and support group. Our group of volunteers and the youth had a small brainstorming session to plan the in-school education visits. It's a bit tricky to talk to kids about HIV/AIDS and protection because the government has a law that we cannot talk to anyone under 20 years old about condoms, unless they come to the centre or a mobile testing site.

I was completely wrong about what VCT stands for, it actually means Voluntary Counselling and Testing... which makes a LOT more sense. To answer your question Doug, I'm not entirely sure how RAY is funded, but this particular project is funded entirely by Josh's efforts. He has received two grants in Winnipeg: $15,000 from a church group and $5,000 from the Carpe Diem Foundation - this foundation was started by the mother of Cpl. James Arnal, who was killed by a roadside bomb. Josh is trying to establish charitable organization status to start receiving donations and be able to provide tax receipts, but the paperwork for this is huge and the process takes an incredibly long time.

After the brainstorming and planning session, we heading out for lunch then back to the centre to wait for the group members to arrive for support group. We had 5 people show up, 4 women and 1 man. The youth member running the session was not normally the one who runs it, so it ended up being very different from a typical session. Unfortunately, the man at the session monopolized the conversation and was essentially asking us all to give them money. I think it's really important to separate the men and the women into different support groups because there was a sense that many of the women were afraid to speak because the man was present. The only difficulty with that is there isn't a man to run the male support group and they also need to corral some more men to attend the support group.

It's interesting to be in the support group as an outsider. The people in the group invite us and want us to be there. It is almost as if they feel more comfortable opening up to us than to other Kenyans because we don't discriminate against people with HIV the way locals do. I've heard stories of people having their houses burned down and of getting kicked out of family homes because people found out they were HIV positive.

Another big obstacle for this project is the government's denial that it's a problem. A lot of leaders have said that Kenya is a good, Christian nation and HIV is not an issue because people do not have sex before marriage and they remain faithful to each other... yeah, I don't think so. There is also such a big push towards teaching abstinence, which does not work in a town that thrives on prostitution.

Josh has told us about Uganda and the success they have seen with a drop of HIV. The important thing that happened there was their leader stepped up and said HIV was an issue and implemented proper measures to reduce it. They did essentially everything we are trying to do through the centre, but people were willing to participate and educate themselves because of their leader stepped forward.

Today is community outreach. We've all been paired up with a local youth who is going to show us the ropes. The weather isn't as hot as it was last week. Apparently last week was unusually hot and we will see more clouds and wind - yaaayyy. I don't know if I would have been able to handle it here if every week was like the last.