Training Reports

Participants

Usually our programme activities involved, besides us, the villagers, CDC experts, a couple of village committee members. But this time there was something special. The village committee members paid real special attention to the programme, so they invited the Mangshi Town’s Party Secretary and vice governors, and Mr. Zhao, head of the Mangshi Town Hospital, brought another head of the hospital and a doctor. The head of the CDC invited the head of Luxi County HIV/AIDS Bureau. The village committee also arranged a singing and dancing for entertainment. Ben also joined the session. Therefore, we had a really big group on our part.

Activities

As usual, we bought small gifts such as towels, tooth-brushes, tooth-pastes, washing pwder, soaps, mosquito coils for the village families as well as some pencils, erasers and exercise books for the village students.

The activity began in the evening around 9 o’clock. The Dai villagers usually finish their supper around 8 o’clock, so when they gathered around the meeting place, it was around 8:30 p.m. But when everything was ready, it was about 9:00 p.m. Nearly 300 villagers participated.

First the doctor from the Mangshi Town Hospital and a Dai woman from the village hosted the evening entertainment show in both HanDai languages. Then the village head made a speech. Afterwards, singing and dancing began. Ben also sang a song, which was warmly welcomed. He could have been a good singer if he had wanted to. The entertainment show was really a great one, everyone doing their utmost.

Our HIV/AIDS knowledge activities were between these singing and dancing shows. Because more CDC people participated, this time we arranged 3 experienced CDC workers to do the lectures and lead the games and competition activities. The lectures and competition activities included:

1. Basic information about HIV/AIDS in the form of questions such as, “What is HIV/AIDS? How does it spread? How to lessen opportunities of catching HIV?”
2. Discussed which behaviors are of high risk to the health of the population
3. The correct way of using condoms
4. Where to have a blood test
5. How to live with HIV positives and how to treat HIV carriers and AIDS patients.
6. Question/answer competition concerning the knowledge covered in the lectures.

The performances were excellent. However, as far as the activity was concerned, it was not as successful as those we had done before in Jingpo and De’ang villages.

The meeting place was the village temple. It was not a big one for about 300 village participants, so it was suggested that the villagers should be divided into two groups only, one group being students, while the other consisting of men and women, young and old. It turned out that it was not a wise decision.

I deal with the group of boys and girls. The younger ones aged between 7-10 cooperated well, while the older ones were naughty and did not listen attentively and a few even didn’t join us. The worse time came when I delivered gifts to them —- the older boys who didn’t take part in the activities grabbed away the pencils and exercise books from my hands without waiting for me to distribute the gifts! That was annoying!

As for the other group, it was not better. When Ms. Cao dongdong from the county CDC instructed on HIV/AIDS knowledge, it was going on OK though some young women were giggling. But when Mr. Ren Da showed them how to use condoms, most of the young women stood up and ran away! It seemed they were shy and disliked talking aobut sex when they were together with the elders.

Though the activities were not all smoothly carried out, we learned from this experience. In the future, we’ll never try to do such actities when the old and young are together, and in some cases, when the men and women are together.