How often do we take care of our families or other people who live close to us? We’re talking about that old proverb of charity begins at home and it indeed brought us to home (Heritage Village (Kitalanga), Kansanga) last Wednesday for #Voices4Health.
To take the cut out of the bag, on the morning of January 25th 2017, we had our first community outreach of 2017 meant to offer free family planning, HIV testing and counseling, cervical cancer screening and counseling, dental services and edutainment for the locals.
The academy session was on ground and it was a good chance for all the new peer educators to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty by putting all their three weeks knowledge in practice. After the session, they were joined by peer educators from other years and by 10am exhibitors were already here to do their shit including.
Bloomberg philanthropists with an army of peer educators swept the areas surrounding Heritage Village creating awareness about services being offered at the outreach to entice the locals to get out of their comfort zone. This was right before the B team came back and inspected various booths which culminated into a tweet up with the Bloomberg philanthropists team.
At the tweetup, we discussed issues about SRHR including the elephant in the room which was implications of the Trump’s decision of cutting funding of foreign NGOs which advocate for sexual reproductive health and rights, as well as issues affecting young people in relation to their reproductive health and rights.
The Bloomberg Philanthropist team was later treated to a very edutaining skit by our partners Kyuka Youth Outreach which was themed on family planning as one way of communicating issues affecting young people in regards to their sexual reproductive health and rights.
In the afternoon, all attention shifted to the main stage where cultural icons treated the locals to free edutainment for close to three hours. The performances were by the Triplet dancers, Fik Fameica, Geosteady, Nutty Neithan, Allan Toniks, Ykee Benda and Navio.
The highlight of the outreach was a live movie translation session by celebrated local Video Jockey Merrysmart Matovu a.k.a VJ Junior. VJ Junior translated the movie Rain which is centered on a story of girl who comes to Kampala hoping to get a better life only ending up contracting HIV/AIDS.
VJ junior led a discussion with the locals to test their knowledge of some of the things they had learnt from the movie which response from the locals was positive.
We called it quits at 10:00pm with locals asking when we will be offering these life changing services and information to them because they couldn’t get enough of what we offered them.
Want to know more about what happened? Check out the hashtag #Voices4Health on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Until then, we’re out!
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edutainment hiv testing and counselling Voices4Health