TIGblogs TIG | TIGblogs GROUP TIGBLOGS LOGIN SIGNUP
sophie harrison - My Blog
sophie harrison - My Blog
« previous 5


Day 6
About this event: XVII International AIDS Conference

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

First of all it’s just plain silly that it’s already day 6!

Secondly Sophie has been unnaturally worried about having needles poked in her head. Today we spent time in the traditional healing zone in the crazily vibrant global village – this fantastic area offered free acupuncture…so why not make the most of it? Probably the fact that you have to have needles poked into you actually…
Although Ruth is verrry excited about the good dreams she will be receiving tonight from having a needle in the ‘point of a thousand ghosts’. Otherwise know as the middle of your head. Along with this incredible benefit the healing of Sophie’s lower back has probably saved UNICEF considerable litigation costs from the amount of cameras and equipment we’ve been dutifully lugging around.

Pizza for breakfast managed to fuel a media mental day. We’ve been grabbing many an interesting interview for our sex education project and for you to sit back, relax and enjoy.

Today we saw one of the most interesting sessions so far with a panel of incredibly involved young people talking about youth participation and the HIV and AIDS response. We’ve seen so many experienced speakers this week in high profile positions that were no where near as engaging or eloquent as some of the panel today. Probing questions made for some very exciting and lively discourse.

We rounded off the day with another session on harm reduction which has become something that we feel should be central to U.K focus of our work. This was closely followed by an impressively horrible meal that’s we attempted to eat whilst being serenaded by a whining Mexican songstress. The fun we have. Thankfully Alice saved the night with some tasty, tasty churros and chocolate.

August 6, 2008 | 12:32 AM Comments  0 comments

Tags:


Day 3 & 4
About this event: XVII International AIDS Conference

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic


Well well, three days in and we are already skipping blog entries! You just cannot get the staff...So today you get two for one, you lucky lucky kids.

Yesterday was super manic. The pre-conference threw us right into workshops, no easing in with a nice talk like we've had other days. We went to one on sex education, where we had a lady frantically typing up everything we said onto a powerpoint. Very exciting! We did brainstorms on why everyone thought sex education was important and why it should be based in human rights. There were around 50+ people in the session from a mind boggling number of places, and everyone babbled away so much that we overran, but since Mr Mark Richmond, UNESCO Global Coordinator for HIV and AIDS (ooooo) said at the end that it was one of the most impressive discussions on sexual education he'd heard (double ooooo), I'd say worth missing snacks for.

Then we had a little help navigating the programme of the main conference (which is a telephone directory. Literally) before everyone else got ready to go on the march against homophobia, but we didn't get to go, sniff. We'd already agreed to discuss a new website called iAIDS which is a wiki type affair for youth working on HIV and AIDS to share their cleverness. We did manage to snaffle a couple of the sassy pink t-shirts that the Mexico Youth Force generously distributed to marchers, though. Check out their catwalk potential. The Mexico Dance4Lifers got everyone in the mood.

It was a good job we had a bit of practice earlier, as the pre-conference ended at a museum, i.e. at the most beautiful party venue ever seen, thanks to Bill and Melinda Gates apparently (triple oooo)! It was bags and bags of fun, featuring Mexico's answer to Kate Nash with a glittery accordion and a lot of poor salsa dancing on our behalves.

So we get to the main shindig, which started this morning, and is absolutely amazing! Pretty cliched, but it really is! Apart from the fact that under 18s count as accompanying children and don't get any cool free stuff. Which is a bit daft considering there was a whole pre-conference for youths about how important our involvement is. We had a bit of a paddy with them about it, which resulted in us finding out that in 2006 they didn't even let under 18s into the youth pre conference (????) and a free cagoul for Sophie. Woo.

At the first session we got to meet Eastern Europe's finest songstresses and a goooorgeous Egyptian actor called Khaled Abol Naga (who made Ruth cry, again) working on HIV and Sexual Health campaigns. It was about how to meaningfully involve high profile people in actions, rather than just have them rock up and not really have a clue what they're talking about just because they reckon it'll help them to shift a few more records. The input from Georgia Arnold from MTV's Staying Alive Foundation was really useful for us, as we've been a bit concerned about trying to get celebrities involved in the Winter Festival idea due to the media backlash around Live8.

Then it just got better, as the next session was all about making safe sex sexy. It was organised by 'The Pleasure Project'. We heard all about safe sex advertising aimed at gay men in Australia, which involved teatowels (we'd link to a picture but they were a little too graphic for this website) and an amazing peer led clinic for sex workers in San Francisco.

Now we're home safe and have made a right mess of the hotel lobby area with junk food debris. Very classy travellers!

http://www.unicef.org.uk/youthvoice

August 4, 2008 | 10:26 AM Comments  0 comments

Tags:


Day 3 & 4
About this event: XVII International AIDS Conference


Monday, August 4, 2008, 04:37 AM
Well well, three days in and we are already skipping blog entries! You just cannot get the staff...So today you get two for one, you lucky lucky kids.

Yesterday was super manic. The pre-conference threw us right into workshops, no easing in with a nice talk like we've had other days. We went to one on sex education, where we had a lady frantically typing up everything we said onto a powerpoint. Very exciting! We did brainstorms on why everyone thought sex education was important and why it should be based in human rights. There were around 50+ people in the session from a mind boggling number of places, and everyone babbled away so much that we overran, but since Mr Mark Richmond, UNESCO Global Coordinator for HIV and AIDS (ooooo) said at the end that it was one of the most impressive discussions on sexual education he'd heard (double ooooo), I'd say worth missing snacks for.

Then we had a little help navigating the programme of the main conference (which is a telephone directory. Literally) before everyone else got ready to go on the march against homophobia, but we didn't get to go, sniff. We'd already agreed to discuss a new website called iAIDS which is a wiki type affair for youth working on HIV and AIDS to share their cleverness. We did manage to snaffle a couple of the sassy pink t-shirts that the Mexico Youth Force generously distributed to marchers, though. Check out their catwalk potential. The Mexico Dance4Lifers got everyone in the mood.

It was a good job we had a bit of practice earlier, as the pre-conference ended at a museum, i.e. at the most beautiful party venue ever seen, thanks to Bill and Melinda Gates apparently (triple oooo)! It was bags and bags of fun, featuring Mexico's answer to Kate Nash with a glittery accordion and a lot of poor salsa dancing on our behalves.

So we get to the main shindig, which started this morning, and is absolutely amazing! Pretty cliched, but it really is! Apart from the fact that under 18s count as accompanying children and don't get any cool free stuff. Which is a bit daft considering there was a whole pre-conference for youths about how important our involvement is. We had a bit of a paddy with them about it, which resulted in us finding out that in 2006 they didn't even let under 18s into the youth pre conference (????) and a free cagoul for Sophie. Woo.

At the first session we got to meet Eastern Europe's finest songstresses and a goooorgeous Egyptian actor called Khaled Abol Naga (who made Ruth cry, again) working on HIV and Sexual Health campaigns. It was about how to meaningfully involve high profile people in actions, rather than just have them rock up and not really have a clue what they're talking about just because they reckon it'll help them to shift a few more records. The input from Georgia Arnold from MTV's Staying Alive Foundation was really useful for us, as we've been a bit concerned about trying to get celebrities involved in the Winter Festival idea due to the media backlash around Live8.

Then it just got better, as the next session was all about making safe sex sexy. It was organised by 'The Pleasure Project'. We heard all about safe sex advertising aimed at gay men in Australia, which involved teatowels (we'd link to a picture but they were a little too graphic for this website) and an amazing peer led clinic for sex workers in San Francisco.

Now we're home safe and have made a right mess of the hotel lobby area with junk food debris. Very classy travellers!

http://www.unicef.org.uk/youthvoice

August 4, 2008 | 10:25 AM Comments  0 comments

Tags:


Day 2
About this event: XVII International AIDS Conference

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Sophie learnt about the history of collage. She then had difficulty overcoming her inner selfish artiste when she worked with a group on a piece about risk. The workshop brought together lots of groups using art techniques to respond HIV and AIDS amongst young people, a fabulous example being Dylan, who you just might get a glipse of if you're lucky and nice in a film we're going to put on the website .

Ruth went to a misleadingly named session on effective writing for media, which just turned into a really impressive discussion about the power of language, but also helped her technophobic self find some friends who'll help with all the digital treats that we have in store for you.

In the breaks we found a lovely bloke from Chicago. He made Sophie go tingly with his stories of the exhibitions he's put on with a group called Project Focus . Now we'd really like to adapt some of their techniques for the Winter Festival that our shiny Unicef groups are planning to hopefully happen on World AIDS Day 2009.

To top the day off we successfully managed to buy a pint bottle of diet coke (AMAZING).

Now we have a fabulous night in store of photo logging (oh my life if we come home with no eyes left don't say we didn't warn you) and interview planning. Woop.

August 4, 2008 | 10:22 AM Comments  0 comments

Tags:


Day 1
About this event: XVII International AIDS Conference

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Day 1

Hello everyone, Sophie Harrison reporting for blogging duties.

Please excuse any fogginess of thought, we have just eaten an obscene amount of meat, on top of still being really quite jetlagged. I never though I´d see the day that I´d jump out of bed at 5.30am. We´re 6 hours behind you Brits, so we were madly emailing parents reading DFID´s actions when we couldn´t sleep, who knew timezones could be so educational?

The pre conference started with a young person from every region of the world (except Western Europe, which was a bit odd, we´re going to follow it up) talking about how HIV and AIDS affect young people in their area. Ruth cried. Luckily I´d managed to bring tissues to stop her snotting on everyone. We were both surprised by the diversity of the groups with the highest prevalence in different areas, it varied from young married women in North Africa to street involved youth in Canada. It was so moving to hear how powerful some youth lead initiatives have been in changing the lives of HIV positive people. It was properly motivating as well, we bounded out clutching Unicef´s camera and accosted loads of people with cute advocacy t-shirts.

We spent th rest of the day in workshops, my personal favourite being on sexuality and the body where we got to draw pictures of willies and pretend to be in a uterus! Another was on harm reduction, by a really cool organisation called Youth R.I.S.E. It was wicked because it´s something neither of us knew anything about and the facilitators were brilliant at getting you to challenge prejudices that you weren´t aware of having. The other workshop featured a lady who was absolutely fascinating, but knew a scary amount about vaccines. So obviously we followed her to a restaurant tonight, then hung around outside a bit like crazed fans.

Tomorrow we´re looking forward to having proper name badges so that I won´t have to explain why my funny Whitby accent does not scan in Spanish when introducing myself.

August 1, 2008 | 5:26 PM Comments  0 comments

Tags:


« previous 5


sophie harrison's Profile


Latest Posts
Day 6
Day 3 & 4
Day 3 & 4
Day 2
Day 1

Monthly Archive
August 2008

Change Language


Filter By Type
Events


3843 views
Important Disclaimer