12 November 2008c

Tuesday: Went to school, gave English teacher some sheets of paper to make a list of students who want to join an English club – I think one on Tuesday afternoon for 6eme and 4eme and one on Friday afternoon for other classes. That way I can reach more students, as I'm hoping to use English club as a place to explore some Life Skills and business skills too.
Went to the home where they are constructing the buildings to grow mushrooms.
Really exciting!
New ONG called AIDER (Action Investir dans l'Entrepreneuriat Rural) is doing a pilot project in Mission Tove to grow mushrooms -> and then use the compost from the mushrooms to grow other vegetables, like potatoes! They're starting with a single groupement to try to get people interested and excited about it.
(This could be a good project to look into PC Partnership funding – to build the houses to grow mushrooms?)

Wednesday: Went to school, reminded 1eres about peer educator meeting, had brief conversations with other profs and worked on my vocab list from the book in French I'm currently reading. I really need to start putting the lists in the bathroom where I'll work on them.
Went back to mushroom project, but nothing much was happening till the afternoon. Went to atelier, played with an adorable baby called Cherita, agreed to teach how to gift wrap on Friday and showed the beginning of my knitting project (knitting strips of plastic bags to form bigger things).

At 15H I had the peer educators group at the lycee. It started 15 mins late because I was waiting for more people to show up. In the end, I had 8 eleves. We did jeu de l'epidemie (a game where we explore how quickly HIV can spread in a community), some True or False questions and then worked on the skits for the ABC's prevention - Abstinence, Bonne Fidelite, Condom, and Depistage (getting tested). The eleves had a lot of fun acting out the skits – we did each skit 4 times in total, with different people in different parts.
I promised we would do condom demonstrations next time, I might also have them do the skits with gender roles reversed – could be interesting to see how they do.
We spent considerable time talking about how an HIV-positive mother can pass the virus to her baby, etc. It got pretty technical, going into the fact that tests measure presence of antibodies rather than the actual virus and therefore all babies born to HIV+ mothers appear to have the virus themselves simply because they have the mother's antibodies. It might be worth doing a couple activities to seriously address the scientific specifics of VIH – not for a general sensibilisation – but to help the mature peer educators better understand in-depth questions.
Stopped by the marche on my way home, grabbed bread, biscuits, tomatoes, a mug with a lid. The soja vendors still hadn't arrived when I was ready to leave, so no soja for me today. I've heard that beans are going to become scarce once we hit the dry season, so I'm going to try to stock up. Important to keep protein levels up.