Our first week...

We just finished our first week of camp! On Monday, we started our HIV/AIDS/Environment education at the Chamwala Full Primary School, which is about an hour and a half from our base in Lilongwe. Driving through the countryside is much different than driving in the US. There is really only one paved road, and the rest of the trip is spent on windy, bumpy, rugged, narrow dirt roads. However, the scenery that we pass by is unforgettable and indescribable. As it is the rainy season, we are surrounded by miles and miles of rolling hills, green vegetation, and row after row of green, budding crops. After being stopped a few times by the Malawian police (apparently it's very normal here to get pulled over, as the police here do not have patrol cars), we finally rolled up to the school. 

Before we get into the curriculum and what we actually did at school, we wanted to tell everyone about the fantastic field assistants we will be working with for the month. The official language of Malawi is Chichewa. Since we do not speak more than three words of Chichewa, we teach in English, and our field assistants translate for the students, and then translate the students' questions or comments or answers back to english for us. There are three field assistants: Lusungu, Peter, and Chikabachi. Lusungu is a 19 year old, who has recently graduated from university and is applying to continue on in journalism school, hoping to become a radio host. Peter is a university professor and Chikabachi is awesome and hilarious (we don't know what he does, but he does eventually want to go back to school to study political science). 

Each morning we gather all the students who will be participating in the workshop in a circle and begin the day with morning songs and icebreakers. We all get the chance to lead the songs, and always have a field assistant with us helping. We do traditional American camp songs like "Boom Chicka Boom," and "Go Bananas." We also do kind of a "head, shoulders, knees and toes" in Chichewa and some song that's basically in gibberish. The kids really love the songs and get into them, which is fun to see, and we all love making fools of ourselves in public. After morning songs, we split into our classes. Part of the World Camp Curriculum stresses teaching the importance of a team and building team morale. So we do a lot of activities like trust falls, the human knot (which is basically impossible to do with kids who don't speak English), and Ultimate Frisbee. 

Once we start teaching, we tell the kids how HIV can be transmitted, how they can protect themselves, and the four fluids that can carry the virus. With this school in particular, we were very impressed with the amount of information our classes already knew. Within the curriculum are a lot of games and activities to teach and show them the different concepts we taught. Just like any other class, a lot of the kids get a bit restless sometimes so the games each day help to keep them awake and involved. One of the funnier things to teach the kids is how to use a condom. We show them the proper way to put on and remove and dispose of condoms using bananas. Definitely not something either of us ever thought we'd be teaching to 16 and 17 year old students. After that we had a contest to see who could blow up a condom the fastest. Needless to say, neither of us won,  and were beat out by African school boys (btws they get significantly bigger then we ever thought....). Finally we created skits to show the friends and family they invited to come watch about HIV and to educate the community. The kids got really into their skits and they were really well received by the village. A lot happened at camp this week and it's really hard to sum up in one blog post without being overly exhausting. 

This weekend we traveled to a Refugee camp to teach about HIV and AIDS. Refugees from the DRC, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and many other African countries are all living in the camp. Many of the people living there will never leave and most can only leave the camp with permission which most will never receive. But surprisingly throughout the camp there is a sense of community, there are schools, a health clinic, and a community center. What we learned from many of the people that we talked to is that the camp is severely lacking in resources for example we spoke to them about getting tested for HIV and getting ARVs if they were HIV positive. However what we learned was without a sufficient supply of food ARVs are rendered useless so many people never get tested because they can't take the ARVs anyways. It was frustrating to hear to such information because we felt as if there really was nothing that we could do to help. The most we can offer is education but education only goes so far if there are no resources to apply that education to. Many of the refugees we spoke to were very frustrated as well and asked us repeatedly to send money and resources to the camp. When we spoke to the hospital they said that ARVs 

On a lighter note... Riss got proposed to in the refugee camp by one of the translators who lived there. She has a standing offer to move in whenever she comes back to Malawi and the refugee camp... 

Tonight was our night off! Usually each night someone is assigned to cook dinner for the group, but on Saturday nights we get to hit the town and go out to dinner. Tonight we ate at an Indian restaurant called Huts. Caitlin thought it was delicious, but Riss was dying with her VERY plain but semi-spicy chicken. Afterwards, we walked over to Diplomats, a popular bar in Lilongwe, the city that never sleeps. Seeing as it was only 8:30 the bar was not bumpin. We broke out the dance moves for a bit, Riss created the dance floor self defense moves, which she will soon be teaching to the entire house. After that we walked back and now we need to get some sleep because we are hiking a mountain tomorrow and are super excited.