HIV training sessions

Once we had finished up our marketing and ISAL sessions, we were able to start working on our focus for the second half of the cycle, HIV/AIDS and gender sessions.

As Caritas, the partner organisation we are working with, is part of the Catholic church we are restricted on the HIV issues we can run sessions on given their stance on the use of condoms. So it was decided that we would focus on HIV nutrition. This topic allowed us to provide training sessions for all the beneficiaries on nutrition while also focussing on the issues that are particular to people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHIV).

This was a really interesting topic for us as the majority of the volunteers had little to no knowledge on HIV/AIDS work, and even less on why nutrition is so important for those living with HIV. Because we had limited time left in our placement we weren’t able to identify groups of people within the farm living with HIV, and so we decided to run the session as a general nutrition session, but with some specific information relevant to caring for people living with HIV or for people living with HIV. It was an interesting session from a cultural exchange perspective as well as we couldn’t just use the food pyramids the UK volunteers were familiar with as they didn’t include traditional Zimbabwean foods. We spoke to the National Aids Council in Zimbabwe and we were able to get access to some specific resources they had on nutrition for people living with HIV in Zimbabwe. It was really interesting as the staple food Sadza obviously has a key role to play, but there were some sources of protein that were less familiar to the UK volunteers such as insects, which we didn’t fancy adding to our Zimbabwean diet!!

The session went down really well with the beneficiaries who were really interested in the general nutrition issues we covered as well as the HIV specific ones. They asked a lot of really insightful questions, most of which we were able to answer from our research and they have asked us to run more similar sessions for them.

It was unfortunate that due to a lack of water availability and the movement of our debrief event forward we were unable to run a second HIV specific session. However, we were able to put together a community event to raise awareness of HIV and to discuss issues including stigma and transmission.