From Tuesday to Thursday of last week, my coworker at Save the Children and I took a work trip down to Ho Chi Minh City. The weather in the south was much warmer than in Hanoi, and even though I’d been there before I had forgotten how big Saigon is. Being the largest city in Vietnam, it is comprised of 19 inner districts and even more suburban ones. Our hotel and office were both in District 1, which struck me as being fairly touristy. Across the hall from us at our hotel was a Vietnamese family who now live in Georgia, and at breakfast I met a couple from Washington who were traveling around the country for a month.
After arriving Tuesday morning, I headed over to our office where my coworkers and I prepared for a workshop that afternoon with some secondary school students who are HIV/AIDS Peer Educators. The workshop was in a school in District 11, about 30 minutes away from the office by cab, and lasted for about three hours. The school where we held the session has had success integrating HIV-infected and affected students from a nearby shelter.
At the workshop, we first gave the children a pre-test to test their knowledge about how HIV/AIDS spreads and what does and does not put a person at risk of catching the virus. Then we asked them to draw and share first, a happy memory, and second, a sad one. After that we did a few activities that served to teach the students about the various ways that HIV can and cannot be transmitted (ex: kissing puts you at no risk; having sex does) and did an exercise where they looked at various pictures of children being out-casted from their friends or families, in an effort to open their eyes to the myriad of ways that stigma and discrimination can negatively impact children’s lives. The workshop also included an advocacy activity where students were assigned to teams that corresponded to various parts of society – government officials, teachers, neighbors, parents, etc. They brainstormed and came up with a list of things that each of these groups should be doing to help children with HIV/AIDS.
We found that these children, like the parents I've been interviewing, think HIV/AIDS can be transmitted while children are playing at school from cuts on the skin (this is actually something they are taught during some of their Peer Education trainings). At the end of the session, we did a question-and-answer session where we taught them that this is so unlikely that it has never happened before, and the post-tests confirmed that the children learned a great deal during those three hours. Below are some of the pictures I took during the session (from my phone so the resolution isn't great).
^The workshop's facilitator, Nghan, works with one of the groups during the Advocacy break-out session.
^One of the groups hard at work during the Advocacy activity. This group represented parents.
^Mai, my coworker (in the yellow top), leads a question-and-answer session with the students.
^These students represented neighbors during the Advocacy game.
When we weren't at work, we went to tons of coffee shops each night and managed to squeeze in some karaoke Saigon style before the trip was over. A few coworkers and I went to a retro cafe called Cafe Xom (right near our office) on the last night. The cafe was full of musicians who study or have already graduated from the HCMC Music Academy (not sure of the formal name); anyway, they played song after song in both English and Vietnamese, and I was blown away by how talented they all were. Before leaving, Mai (my coworker) and I met one of the most talented singers of them all, a man named Y-Rock who grew up in the highlands and now does nationwide singing fundraisers to raise money for his hometown (Check him out here: http://www.tagged.com/guitarist_rocky -- I am convinced that he is the Vietnamese version of James Franco).
^Y-Rock is the guy in the gray tank top.
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