Día Mundial De VIH/SIDA Manteniendo La Luz sobre VIH/SIDA y derechos humanos

World Aids Day is celebrated on the 1st of December around the globe, since HIV/AIDS is a large part of our work here in Honduras it would make sense for us to do something right? Kinda. As of the last week in November we hadn’t talked about World AIDS day at all in my health center or maternal clinic and I was OK with that, I figured I’d try to put something small together and give some talks in the health center, nothing too flashy. I’d been really busy with other projects and if nobody else was on board to do something I wasn’t going to take it personally. Just when I had gotten that all rationalized in my mind everything changed, of course. The head boss in our Maternal Clinic, the licenciada Francisca, with less than a week before the big day casually comes up to me and says, “so Stu, what do you think about doing a big World AIDS day celebration next Wednesday?”, I said that sounded good if other people were on board too, she promised me that they were…they weren’t really. I tried to gather some support from two of the health promoters, but because of some communication error they had yet to hear about the plans and were busy with other things. Monday rolled around, 2 days before the first and the the Lic. asked me how things were going and I said slowly. That’s when things kicked into gear. She ordered a meeting with all the health personnel and we got working, deciding that celebrating on Friday would be a better idea. All week we worked on stuff for the project, I’ll spare you the details, but we worked long hours but had fun doing it. We made torches and posters as well as decorating a truck for a march that we did around town with a drum band to get people attention. We also decorated the park gazebo with AIDS ribbons and posters and had pamphlets to pass out with info. The march ended up being a lot of fun, lots of people came out to watch us, this was followed up by educational activities in the park. All in all it was a success I’d say, there are definitely a few kinks that we will work out for World AIDS day 2011 but we learned lots and hopefully taught more.