Fulbright-mtvU Fellows

“Ready To Fight This War With You”

I am about to burst with excitement. It’s an odd couple of antsy excitement and humility actually. I just had a very inspiring day in Malawi.

I had heard of the organization World Camp for Kids when I was in North Carolina during this project’s planning stages. I have a few friends who have done their Malawi program and each one came back raving “oh Andrew you HAVE to go meet World Camp!! You have to go see what they do.” By coincidence their American office is in my home town Asheville and their Malawi office is in my “new home” town Lilongwe.
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Tags: HIV, Malawi, World Camp for Kids

Goodbye For Now…

For my final blog entry, I will provide an overview of the work I did while in Uganda, discuss project sustainability and future plans, and share a few lessons learned from my Fulbright experience.

The Overview

The goal of my Fulbright project was learn how the Hip Hop Therapy Project (HHTP) could be strengthened to better serve the young people participating in it. In this effort, I conducted a needs assessment exercise with the aim of using the findings to inform the project’s growth and development.

After speaking with over 30 young people and meeting with other project stakeholders I decided to focus my efforts on:

Developing more training, performance, and competition opportunities for project
members

Increasing the number of youth benefiting from the project

Increasing access to age-appropriate HIV-, sexual-, and reproductive healthrelated
information for project members

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Tags: Aids, Dr. Dre, Gulu Youth Center, Hip Hop Therapy Project, HIV, National University of Ireland, Uganda

Two Weeks Before Heading Off To Malawi

It’s two weeks before I head off to Malawi and I am buzzing. I am currently trying to read everything ever written about HIV/AIDS in preparation and the reading list just seems to be getting longer and longer. I am definitely “hooked” on this subject.

I recently got a CD of Peter Mawanga’s “Zanga Zo zama,” the primary musician who I plan to collaborate with in Malawi. Peter’s music is hard to get in the states and he actually arranged an inter-continental rendez-vous between myself and a mutual friend who gave me his CD. I closed my eyes yesterday and listening to the whole thing from start to finish and was left salivating at this guy’s breadth of musical knowledge. He rocks.
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Tags: Aids, HIV, Malawi, Peter Mawanga, UNICEF, Vingoma NA Visekese

Hip Hop Meets Health Education

During the recent needs assessment exercise I conducted with children participating in the strong>Hip Hop Therapy Project (HHTP) two of the needs that emerged were:

1.The children expressed a need for more information around sexual and reproductive health.

2. The children expressed the desire to showcase their breakdance skills and talents.

In an effort to respond to the first expressed need, I decided to partner with Straight Talk Foundation. Straight Talk Foundation is a Ugandan health communication organization that promotes communication for social change through print, radio and face-to-face interventions for adolescents (ages 10-19) and young adults (ages 20-24). Straight Talk Foundation also operates the Gulu Youth Centre, which provides free tests and treatment for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases (STD), counseling services, and health information materials for young people.

Straight Talk Foundation has agreed to provide space at the Gulu Youth Centre for breakdance classes to take place. This will help to expand the size of the Hip Hop Therapy Project as well as increase direct access to sexual and reproductive health education and services for the young people participating in the project.
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Tags: Aids, Breakdance Project Uganda!, Gulu Youth Center, Hip Hop Therapy Project, HIV, Straight Talk Foundation