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sophie harrison - My Blog
sophie harrison - My Blog
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

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