Meet “Lagosman:”

For World AIDS Day, Club Santé (Health Club) and Club Feminin (Girls Club) presented a skit featuring “Lagosman,” a successful businessman from, clearly, Lagos, who comes bearing money, and of course, HIV. He represents the phenomena of the spread of HIV from urban to rural areas. His strategy is to hit on high school girls at the bar and give them money, and, in the process, then spread HIV to them.

So, the girl gets kicked out of her house by her father, who thinks that he’ll catch HIV just from being around her and sharing meals with her. Then, her friends come to the rescue and explain to her father that no, that’s no the case, (“You mean that HIV is different from cholera?!”) and they talk about the importance of reducing stigmatization. The girl returns home, and she then becomes a peer educator. Huzzah! I hope that people really meant the anti-stigmatization message, but I’m really not sure.

The previous week, I had given Club Santé a poster that I had made on HIV/AIDS for my girls’ camp in Kolofata, and some of the members copied it onto more sheets of poster paper and hung them around the school campus, explaing the basics of the modes of transmission and the fluids that transmit HIV.

While planning World AIDS Day with Club Santé, I thought that it would be a good idea to get my newly formed Girls Club involved, since girls are more vulnerable to HIV for biological and socio-cultural reasons. I just finally started my Girls Club around the end of October. The faculty sponsor is from Yaoundé and very passionate about girls’ empowerment. When I proposed getting Girls Club involved with World AIDS Day, she was really enthusiastic about the idea. She came up with the idea for a poem, which one of the girls ended up writing herself and presenting, along with “slogans” about how HIV can affect anyone and about reducing stigmatization.

It’s hard to know if anything of this makes a difference, but if it just changes something, it’ll be worth it.