HIV/AIDS Bike Ride in Wa West District

PeaceCorps Volunteer HIV/AIDS Bike Ride
So I will start this blog off with a slightly humiliating note...well maybe quite humiliating, but you can decide for yourself! I had built up a somewhat false sense of confidence on my biking ability. I thought, I used to ride a bike, and do spin classes once in a while at the gym, this is going to be fine. 90 km bike over a week? No problem! Well, I was way off the mark. THese skills of mine, they did not transfer to a mountain bike and the terrain of Africa. After some adjustments to the bike and smalll attempts, and a near disatourous crash very near into an open sewar (with an audience of at least 50 villagers watching and luaghing at the nasala (white person)), It was decided that I would be riding a motorbike for the bike ride. It wasn't hurt very much from my fall, don't worry. My ego may have been slightly bruised, but that is something I can easily weather!
During the week my team of 12 Ghanaians, myself and a PCV, Mike travelled to 10 different villages in the Upper WEst Region of Ghana in the Wa West district. We facilitated presentations that focused on HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention, There was singing, dancing, games, questions (and comments from some villagers who disagreed with some of what were delivering!) and many people's favourite activity, the condom demonstrations. We had a very good turn out to our programs, reaching over 2000 people. The program overall with all the teams had numbers of over 13.000. This is all fine, but for me, I think that the measurement of what message and information people took away is more important than physical number (also, much much harder to measure...) Many of those who came to our presentations were youth, who are Ghana's future, so this made our group very happy! GHana has a comparatively low rate of HIV/AIDS compared to other countries, but this does not mean that the fight has stopped. In the Upper West where this bike ride was taking place, they are trying harder than ever to get the mesaages about awareness and prevention across. It was exciting to be a part of this!
The village my group was based in was called Lassia Tuolu. It seemed much smaller than Tuna, but I think this is because of how spread out it is. WE slept at the primary school, outside on the front steps. At first I thought this was really cool, sleeping under the stars. My ex itement soon faded when I discovered that spiders also inhabited this area. My fear of these little fellows along with some stomach problems resulted in me spending a few of the nights with a local health care worker I became friends with. My first Ghanaian girl friend, she is a nurse, with plans to study nutrition. We had some great discussions about our cultures, religions(she is Muslim) and even boys! (Great things only Stephen:)) It was nice to have some girl talk!I made friends with the other members of my team as well, through hilarious attempts at card games, building cards houses, learning how to do laundry (what I think will be never-ending for me!) and lots of laughs, which I think were often at my expense. All in all it was a great week! Until Next time!!!!