On December 1st Santa Barbara joined with cities all over the world to celebrate World AIDS Day. The HIV/AIDS Network in Santa Barbara managed to organize a huge event for the day, including a vigil, parade, a testing campaign, education games with prizes, presentations, an HIV/AIDS rapid testing campaign and musical, theater and dance presentations. December 1st also happens to be the start of feria (festival) in Santa Barbara which gave it even more publicity. The HIV/AIDS Network is made up of most of the organizations in Santa Barbara that somehow work with HIV and they all pitched in to organize something that I never could have done on my own. Sometimes things in Honduras are horribly disorganized and sometimes they just fall into place, it’s amazing.
Friday night the Catholic Church sponsored a vigil to honor those infected and affected by HIV/AIDS.
The Central Park where we held the activities
Sign translation: HIV/AIDS Network Santa Barbara
Community leaders such as the vice-mayor, the director of education and many of the members of the HIV/AIDS Network sat at the head table to support the event.
For me the testing campaign was one of the most important aspects of the day. There is still substantial stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS and many people are scared to get tested. In order to help reduce the stigma of even getting tested and promote the importance of having the test we asked community leaders to get tested as an example. Here the vice-mayor is getting the test done in the central park in front of everybody. In total we did 36 HIV tests during the day.
One of the local cultural centers brought a group of kids to sing. How cute.
The folkloric dance group that I dance with also performed
Overall it was an amazing success and I hardly had to do anything (and that is exactly how it should be).
The president of Honduras even showed up to ride in the parade on his horse. He is the one of the left with the big mustache.
