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sophie harrison - My Blog
sophie harrison - My Blog
Day 1
About this event: XVII International AIDS Conference

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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

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