News from the HOPE interns

Dear visitors !

A new recruit has joined our ranks, her name is Meera, she comes from the UK and is studying linguistics and spanish at the university of Southampton.

We had two workshops since the last time we posted a message on this blog and they both went incredibly well.

The first one was directed at form VI students, most of them were 18 years old and really enjoyed our presentation, even tough from the feedback they gave us they wished we had had a condom demonstration. This will definitely be included in the next workshop, do not worry !

They were very open about HIV/AIDS and asked very challenging questions such as how does breat milk get infected? Can I get infected through oral sex? How long does it take the virus to spread?

We played the famous bang bang game which was an immediate success. No matter what age our audience is, they always enjoy it very much.

The second workshop, the one we had on thursday, was a bit of a challenge because we were expecting two groups of 40 students and we had one big group of 70 so we had to quickly re-organise ourselves into one big team, re-distribute the roles and come up with effective ways of keeping their attention at all times. Even though the group was much bigger than usual, the session ran smoothly and each of us joined them during group discussions.

It was nice to hear first-hand what sex education is like in Malaysia, especially in public schools where they rarely talk about sex and drugs. Most them had never seen a condom in their lives and were curious to know how it worked, and how it was supposed to be used.

We believe that being slighlty older than them was a good factor that made communication between us and them quite easy and honest. Most of them agreed that this had been one of the best presentations they had at their school.

It was heart-warming to get such a positive feedback, it only encouraged us even further to made our presentation perfect (we've been improving it after every single workshop) and we hope that the next batch of interns will add their own ideas to it.

So far, this has been an amazing and enriching experience and we hope that if, just like us, you care about education and health then do not hesitate to join the HOPE Project and help us to keep making a difference !

Hasta soon

Lavina, Han Yang, Wanyu, Ji Sun, Bora, Meera, Maria and Bonita