March 10th, 2011, we held a Women & Girl’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day event in Sioux Falls. It was a joint project between Volunteers of America, Dakotas; SD Department of Education, Coordinated School Health; Office of Women’s Health; and SD Department of Health, Office of Disease Prevention. We invited area professionals in counseling and social work, and most importantly, young Native American teen women from a nearby Indian School. We started the morning with HIV 101 presented by a local infectious disease doctor. This was followed by a keynote address by Jane Fowler, an HIV+ in her 70s, who discussed HIV of the elderly. After lunch, we separated into youth and adult tracks.
The youth track was an awesome experience! We had about 35 female Native American high school students participate. In past trainings, we have struggled with keeping the attention of the young people, but this year was different. We had them participate in two exercises to enforce the ideas that anyone can get HIV and how HIV is transmitted. First, we played a candy game developed by Advocates for Youth, which demonstrated risk of HIV transmission and what it might feel like to be infected. Next we acted out “Sex in the City – An Inside View” which offers a visual representation of how HIV actually infects a person via sex. We ended the youth track with a question and answer session. The young women remained engaged through the whole process. It was very obvious how much the girls learned by the questions they asked, the comments they made, and the positive response we got from them via written evaluations.
Amy Beshara
amy.beshara@state.sd.us
www.doe.sd.gov/schoolhealth/index.asp
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