Taazaa Khabar: Oct 17-24

This past week at PJI we hosted a Peer Educators Workshop on HIV in collaboration with the University of Rajasthan's Department of Adult and Continuing Education. We worked with 69 participants from the university to raise awareness of the HIV issue, help educate about the details, and enable young people to serve as peer educators to further spread knowledge about this disease.

HIV and AIDS are important social issues facing India, but a surprisingly large amount of educated young people lack crucial knowledge about these health concerns. The foremost goal of the workshop was to allow expert facilitators such as Mr. Pradeep Chaudhary, Ms. Kavita A. Verma, Ms. Mona Balani, and Ms. Neelima to share their knowledge about HIV with participants and dispel many of the myths associated with the disease. The workshop also included acting out HIV scenario role plays, discussions of HIV services available in Rajasthan, and talks about the various stigmas and discrimination faced by HIV-positive individuals. The potential role of youth volunteers in HIV prevention programs was an important component of empowering the participants to play an active role in solving this enormous social issue.

Coordinator Richa Sharma felt the workshop was a big success in raising the knowledge level about HIV/AIDS. "The participants had never talked about AIDS/HIV issues, so the biggest achievement was that they spoke about the issue and they raised their concerns and questions. Most of them were bachelor of education students, and they are the future teachers, so it was nice to answer their queries and they understood their responsibility to educate more people about HIV/AIDS."

The workshop included a pre-test and a post-test to evaluate the participants' existing knowledge of HIV and how much the activities were able to improve from this base. The participants demonstrated much improved knowledge about misconceptions and facts regarding the HIV issue.