There’s more to life than HIV!
25 June 2007
Adriana Gomez, journalist and co-ordinator of Saber Viver, explains how a project with adolescents in Brazil is giving them a strong new voice
Health workers and carers in Brazil are welcoming an Alliance-initiated project with HIV-positive adolescents, reporting that workshops are helping to end their isolation. They also say that a magazine produced by and for young people in the same project is proving an effective and safe way to work with young people, especially those who have yet to announce their status publicly.
Early feedback is suggesting that the project, set up in March by the Alliance, Saber Viver and Grupo Pela Vidda Niterói, is fast becoming an important vehicle for mainstreaming the young people’s voices. It shows that adolescents do want to talk to other young people, and that some of them want to do prevention work as well.
The pilot project Thinking about the Future was set up to create a safe, inclusive and empowering space for young people to talk about themselves and about living with HIV. It is also proving helpful for exploring issues such as young people’s rights, participation, poverty, discrimination, disclosure, gender and sexual and reproductive health.
The most important message from the young people seems to be that there is more to life than HIV. A key part of the project is to create a space for them not only to talk about issues surrounding HIV but also about themselves and their lives.
The project, which has been working with around 20 HIV-positive 12 to 16-year-olds in Rio de Janeiro and Niteroi (a city located 60 km from the capital), is encouraging the young people to select and develop themes for the project themselves. Eventually they will take full control while the adults facilitate.
The adolescents have now identified the three main areas in which they want to work. These are advocacy, sexuality and prevention. But the project also has a number of other pressing issues to explore, such as why there are more girls than boys in the groups, how to address the discrimination in schools and communities faced by children growing up with HIV, and how to revise child protection policies with the participation of young people.
While both groups are formed of lower-middle-class teenagers, the young people in the Niterói workshops became HIV positive by vertical transmission from a parent, whereas in Rio de Janeiro some acquired HIV through unprotected sexual encounters and violence. To the Rio de Janeiro group it seems as if contracting HIV has been simply another challenge in their lives, with the subject rarely brought up by those in the workshop. In Niterói, on the other hand, themes surrounding HIV infection are routinely considered, most likely because HIV has always been part of the lives of these young people.
Saber Viver is a Rio de Janeiro-based organisation that produces a magazine for people living with HIV and Grupo Pela Vidda Niterói is their linking non-governmental organisation.
Read more about the Thinking about the Future project.
