Teaching teachers

Last Tuesday Aimee and myself along with Gilbert, Chipiro and Lot from Youth Impact (one of our partners) went to visit the Machinga Teacher Training College south of Liwonde. This new institution built and funded by the government provides teacher training to several hundred students with the government meeting most of the costs – there is a need for good education in rural areas.

We met with Austin who is a teacher there and runs a branch of Theatre for Change – a  DFID backed programme working along the lines of several others we have encountered – using theatre and dance to engage local young people with the issues of HIV awareness and prevention.  The group at the college has around 90 members and the hope is that they will be able to use what they do when they are working in schools once they graduate.

Our meeting on Tuesday took place in the small classroom next to the TforC office. When we arrived on Sunday we were in a large hall, complete with microphones, speakers , a video camera and all 90 members of Theatre for Change – we had been expecting a much smaller crowd!!

Gilbert started by sharing his experience of discrimination due to his HIV Status (if you haven’t read my last blog post – please go and look now –it is  part of Gilbert’s story and well worth reading!) and then we spoke. We talked about Progressio, our programme and the work we had been doing with Youth Impact and how we had found that what people most enjoyed was the interactive nature of what we were doing. We shared the games that we had come up with – an agree/disagree game looking at some of the myths and stigmas that are attached to HIV and then we were shown some of the games that Theatre for Change use.

One gave us all the instruction to walk around the room, not speaking or touching anyone. We were given a small piece of paper which when opened either said + or -. This is HIV status, there were 4 people who were positive, and were asked to stand at the far side of the room. We were then asked that anyone who had spoken to or bumped into these people while we were walking round to go and stand with them, and then anyone who had bumped into us to come and join to. There were a handful of people where we started but nearly all of us  were now at the positive end. They uses this game to talk about prevention methods ( abstinence, one partner and condom use) and also to look at stigma, the people at the far end, even in a game who didn’t want to admit they had touched or spoken to one of us who was infected.

We had bought the football and netball teams from Kwatukumbuchire and had a match against the TTC teams. We lost the netball (the first time in all our visits they haven’t triumphed!) and the football was either 2-1 or 2-2, depending on if our second goal was offside or not – we all choose to believe it was a draw!!

This weekend we are going to Lake Malawi near Mangochi with the staff from Youth Impact (not a work thing, they just want us to have a chance to go on our day off!!) then on Sunday will be conducting our stigma/discrimination issues in a local prison. In our enquires we have gone from being told we can NOT go – to being told “We have 300 inmates with HIV, do you want to speak with them all?”