we shout for the advice, what shall we do?

Yesterday was World AIDS Day. And I actually knew about it, without my public health sister or brother-in-law telling me. I meant to post this yesterday but got distracted, but better late than never.

In Uganda it was so crazy to me that I knew people with AIDS. You always hear about it but it never hit me how huge of a tragedy it is until I met some really amazing people who have the virus. I remember meeting with the HIV/AIDS positive group, called Live Positively, and being so incredibly inspired by them. Every single person in the group has HIV or AIDS, and their objective is to give support to each other, spread awareness about the virus, and teach people that they can still live positive, fulfilling lives even if they are HIV positive. They were so optimistic, so grateful for everyday they have to live, and so welcoming of new people. In Africa there is a stigma attached to AIDS, that if you have it you are a bad, wicked person. But that is so wrong. Many people are innocent victims of this disease--who got it from an unfaithful partner, or from mother-to-child-transmission.

In my International Health class we were learning about AIDS and our teacher asked if we thought AIDS was really the tragedy that it is talked up to be. One girl said it wasn't because the disease is preventable, and that typhoid is more of a tragedy because you can get it just from people coughing near you. But I disagree. I think that makes it more of a tragedy. AIDS is so preventable, but yet millions of people are still infected and millions are dying.

This summer in Uganda we had an AIDS Extravaganza...or rather a Mega-Youth Festival as they called it. Sidenote, Kristie gave me the idea..she's a legend. We wanted to remove the stigma of AIDS, to inspire and show the people of Lugazi that they need to help each other fight this disease. It was a huge success. We had tons of schools perform, women's group's performed, and even the HIV/AIDS group I talked about earlier did a dance to "We're All In This Together" with some of our volunteers. Not gonna lie, I got emotional watching it haha. It was so great. We had free HIV testing and then 3 of us got to tell people their results and do counseling with them. I even got tested...and I'm negative. It was an amazing experience to talk to the people individually and ask them how they would feel if they found out they were HIV positive. Or if their test came out negative, what they would do to keep it negative. They were all SO relieved and SO happy when we told them their results were negative. And some of these were 12 and 13 year olds. I definitely was not concerned with getting infected with HIV when I was 12. I probably didn't even know what it was.

My dad told me last week that one of his best friends from high school died of AIDS a few years ago. That seriously blows my mind. You never hear of that happening in the US these days. AIDS is such a devastating disease and I wish we could just make people change their behavior so that slowly, this disease could start going away.

Anyways, I wanted to share a video from Uganda. These girls are all orphans whose parents died of AIDS. There are more parts to the song, where they describe the disease and the symptoms and act it out a little bit, this is just the chorus. The first time they sang this song for us the two girls on the right started crying and could not finish the song. It was heartbreaking.

I've been singing this the past two days. And everyday in Uganda after we heard it, it gets stuck in your head



So, Happy World AIDS Day. Maybe this year they will discover a vaccine to combat AIDS