Esto es Bolivia...

During our placement here we carried out 37 workshops and 3 public events to raise awareness of HIV and AIDS.  We had about 1000 young people attending the workshops in total.  We carried out over 800 knowledge surveys (with improvement of up to 48% over the groups), over 600 behaviour surveys, and over 500 public surveys. In addition to this we spent many days helping at the compassion centre.  The team are really going to miss our friends in Sucre and it was hard to say goodbye.

First team has gone home so I wanted to reflect and share different experiences that became very normal to us but, on reflection, I know they wouldn’t be normal back home in UK!

• -          Being a group of eight and therefore knowing that one taxi is enough… having two in passenger seat or more if they’re children… or two in the boot playing uno :-)
• -          Seeing cars have near misses every day
• -          Being surprised to see a car without a cracked windscreen.
• -          Being surprised to see a new car (i.e. less than 10 years old)
• -          Being the loudest people on the bus due to having a conversation at normal UK volume.

• -          Paying 1B (10p) for the bus ride.
• -          Paying 3 times the price that nationals pay to enter tourist attractions.
• -          Tripping/falling on the uneven pavement… all the time, often resulting in bodily harm.
• -          Helping kids in the compassion centre to focus on their homework, which consists of writing out pages of “ma – me – mi – mo – mu”
• -          Having no work because of strikes and lorries blocking all the main roads.

• -          A woman walking a herd of a sheep and pigs through the city.
• -          Eating fried food every day

• -          Talking about bowel movements every day, often in public, saying everything in English except “caca” or “caca agua” so those around us would have no doubt of the subject.
• -          Being pleased to discover your lunch has a few bits of carrot in it and is therefore a healthy meal.
• -          Wanting to eat healthier food and yet snacking on copious amounts of dulce de leche.
• -          Not being able to fully identify every part of the chicken that was served to us.
• -          Buying super mini bottles of fizzy drinks and asking for them to empty it into a bag with a straw so that you don’t have to return the glass bottle.
• -          Everything being sold on the street… often by children.
• -          The customer is always wrong.
• -          Bargaining to get a final two bolivianos discount despite that being less than 20p.
• -          Going downstairs to go to church on Sunday evenings… still arriving late.

• -          The one indigenous lady in every church who claps out of time… good for her! :-)
• -          Indigenous women wearing skirts pinned together so that they don’t quite close and never understanding why.
• -          Our Hong Kong team member being a major celebrity in the workshops.
• -          The internet being so slow that it was often unusable.
• -          Failing to make any cake, other than flapjack.

-           

I know that it won’t be easy to adjust to life back home… once we were back in the guesthouse in Cochabamba, Laura referred to the toaster as a “toast oven” and Lucy stood looking at it, then asked: “how do you turn this thing on?”

Bye girls!! Really going to miss my first team! ... New team arrives tomorrow!

Latest news from Team Sucre

So these last two weeks have been BUSY!! We have done a total of 27 workshops and spoken to around 1,000 young people… and now we have to log ALL the data of the questionnaires. We have been working with children from ages 13- 18 years old. We have been doing a variety of activities with them. For the older ones we have been doing Mitos y Realidad (myths and realities), jigsaws that encourage them to think about the prejudice behind HIV and why we should talk more about HIV/AIDS. With the young ones we have been playing more games to promote awareness about HIV/AIDS such as a virus attack game, this allows the children to understand more how easily HIV can be transmitted and how easily people can be unaware that they have contracted it. Also we were able to explain how important it is to be educated about the true facts about how it’s transmitted. The young people have been responding well, the children engage in the activities and seem to really enjoy the workshops. Every school we have been to so far have asked us to return… hence why we have done 27 workshops! As well as raising awareness about HIV/AIDS we have also been trying to recruit new volunteers for the next ICS team as well as for PATSIDA. We’ve been encouraging people to like our Facebook page, ‘Patsida Sucre’ – please like it so we look popular!

We have also been lucky enough to be involved with another project. Whenever we don’t have workshops, we are able to go to a home work support centre which is funded by Compassion International. This centre supports children, whose parents are often unable to help them with their homework due to their parent’s lack of education. The children are selected depending on their household income. It helps children from ages 3-14 years old, the classes are split into morning and afternoon depending on when they have school. The centre also provides a nutritious meal at lunch which is usual the only meal they get of the day.  We helped at the centre by helping them with their homework and by loving them. At the centre, it is very important to educate the children on health and sanitation. So before lunch and snack time the children go and wash their hands with soap and running water.

 

We only have 3 weeks left on our project, but over these last few weeks we have perfected our workshops and really come together as a team. So we hope for these last few weeks to be really productive and do lots more workshops.

Love Team Sucre x

events, events, events

Hola amigos!

(This is our news as of last week because we had a virus and couldn´t upload before... have since had an interesting weekend which we´ll update you on next time)

Water balloons and water guns are a daily fear whenever we leave the house because it’s Carnival season! After a few near misses and many hits, we have another month of wearing waterproofs ahead.  It is the end of a busy week of events for the team so we are all tired! Because of Carnival we have this Friday till Tuesday off and we are taking the opportunity to join a local church on their camp from Sunday till Tuesday in a random town which apparently has thermal pools!  We’ll see how that goes…!

After two weeks of preparation and unknowns we had our first public fair in the central plaza on Monday. Things started off Bolivian style as after putting up our tent we were told we had to move to a different area of the plaza (even though the fair had technically started half an hour before) which involved eight people picking up two tents and struggling through a busy plaza. After all this kerfuffle was complete we all felt very proud as our tent and decorations looked great and we were definitely the most inviting and striking tent of the lot! I think an essential element was our terribly English bunting draped across the tents. Our aim, working for Patsida, was to raise awareness of the realities of HIV/AIDS and advertise our form of prevention. The fair was typically Latin American as a procession of young people; musicians and banner holders came colourfully dancing through the plaza, including a big group of boys dressed as condoms! We were surprised at how willing people were to stop and talk to us on the street. We spoke to loads of people who were interested in Patsida’s prevention, general HIV facts and myths and realities game. Our Roulette game captured a large audience in which people were asked questions about HIV or given prizes. The English team took the task of speaking about quite a complex issue in Spanish in their stride and all showed great teamwork (at one point there were 5 people explaining different parts of the Patsida prevention).  

Tuesday morning we were at a school fair which proved rather chaotic because we did not expect loads of primary school children to be there as well. Seeing as our material is targeted at teenagers we had to fend off loads of children desperate to play the roulette game with crosswords and pairs. That afternoon we had a visit from our in-country manager, David who gave us advice as we prepared for a workshop with night classes that evening. We had no idea what to expect, only that people who attend these night classes were generally from poor backgrounds, had dropped out from school and worked during the day and the classes would be around 30 people. We arrived to find we had two classes of 50 people or more, there was a real mix of people and different ages with some mothers and babies. We were all pleasantly surprised at their willingness to learn, engage and listen to what we had to say (much better than in the typical British classroom!). The English team started off with an introduction and we played a ‘myths and realities of HIV’ game, a jigsaw factsheet race and discussion on how we could tackle the rising HIV rates in society. We finished with an explanation of Patsida’s form of prevention which went down really well because of Eduardo’s (Patsida Sucre leader) expertly funny acting.

Wednesday involved another early start to get to another health fair. Somewhat similar to Monday morning, all the attendees arrived in procession, dressed up singing and dancing. It was a really good atmosphere and we managed to talk to a good number of people about HIV, as well as a sneaky dance with the locals and some fancy dress zebras!

We’re having a welcome break after so many events but we learnt so much and are currently evaluating and improving on everything.

Our News..............

Sorry for the delay in posting our first update, we have been very busy and with limited internet access!

We were all reunited in Cochabamba on 2^nd Feb and then went to a camp for our orientation week.  This was a great chance to get to know one another better and also the Bolivians on our team, whilst doing a variety of outdoors activities.  The camp was at 3,300 metres and the sun did not come out much so we did spend a lot of time cold and wet unfortunately!

One night we held a British cultural evening where we prepared Cottage Pie and Banoffee Pie (apparently American?! …oops!) for everyone and taught them some Ceilidh dances and then presented some information about our country including photos of where we each come from.  Our Bolivian audience were highly entertained by our examples of different regional accents, the height of our tallest mountains, the times of day when it is acceptable to drink tea (anytime) etc.

On the Friday evening we returned to Cochabamba and said our goodbyes to the Cochabamba teams, which was a sad time as everyone had bonded so well.  After a 2 hour delay on Saturday we took our 30 min flight to Sucre where we were welcomed by our host families.

We’ve spent the last week working out what we’re doing here with Patsida, being trained in the different topics that we’ll be teaching, planning activities, buying resources, folding boxes, creating and learning a dance about HIV transmission.  On Saturday evening we had our first event; we were trying to recruit more local volunteers from a church in Sucre.  We performed our dance, challenging the young people to work out what the myths and realities of HIV were and giving a short message about God’s love and loving others. Our biggest event will be on Monday the 24^th of Feb where we are taking part in a public HIV/AIDs convention. Hopefully our tent with its wheel of fortune ‘get your facts right’ game and our beautiful bunting will attract lots of people and raise awareness of the realities of HIV/AIDS.

Sucre is a beautiful and generally peaceful city with many students. The weather here is extremely up and down and the whole team agree they haven’t brought enough clothes (except for Laura). We have explored this historical city and we’ve already bought some traditional clothing so we feel like proper Bolivians. We have tried a variety of local dishes (some being better than others)!  Unfortunately, this has also resulted in most of the team getting ‘ill’… if you know what I mean… Thankfully we are now all starting to get accustomed to the local cuisine!

That’s all for now. Please be praying for us over these next few weeks for:
                -health
                -productivity
                -confidence in speaking Spanish
                -supernatural knowledge in Spanish of HIV/AIDS.