After many months of anticipating my departure and start of my internship, the day finally arrived Wednesday August 8th. The 22 of us interns met at a small inn (shout out to Bruce at Pierce's Inn in Hanover!) After all of us finally arrived we drove/hiked to a cabin a few miles away from the inn for a few days of bonding in the woods without the unnecessary uses of technology or electricity. Once we got through the standard questions of "where are you from, where did you go to school, degree/major, etc." then the fun really began.
The orientation was beautifully coordinated and organized by 4 insanely amazing staff members who have literally give their heart, blood, sweat & tears to GRS over the years. Mad props to Leah, Elise, Hooter and Austin for getting all of us prepared and pumped for the start of our internships!!
Although I am still trying to recover from and process the information overload that was gifted to us during the 4.5 day orientation, I'll do my best to cover the highlights and break it down a bit.
GRS Mission: Grassroot Soccer uses the power of soccer to educate, inspire, and mobilize communities to stop the spread of HIV.
Vision: A world mobilized through soccer to create an AIDS free generation.
Strategy: To achieve our mission, we continuously imporve our innovative HIV prevention and life-skills curriculum, share our program and concept effectrively, and utilize the popularity of soccer to increase our impact.
The first night was filled with a delicious dinner where we had a better chance to talk and get to know each other, followed by an appearance by Dr. Tommy Clark (one of the founders and CEO of Grassroot Soccer) and his family. He eloquently told us the story of how GRS was founded and elaborabed a bit on the timeline and major accomplishment that GRS has had throughout its 10 year history. He conceived the idea after playing soccer professionally in Zimbabwe and losing many friends to the disease, allowing him to experience first hand the devastation of HIV and the insane popularity of soccer. So together with a group of friends who had similar expereince, he and co-founders Methembe Ndlovu, Ethan Zohn and Kirk Fredrich created Grassroot Soccer. To say that I am incredibly proud, humbled and excited to work for this organization for the next year would be a huge understatement. To date, GRS has graduated over 500,000 kids in the 5 different Skillz curriculum programs and their goal is to graduate 1 million kids by the 2014 World Cup in Brasil. Straight up amazing stuff.
I'll start with some of the facts and stats I learned about the HIV virus itself and the epidemic that is currently taking place in Southern Africa, which will help explain a bit more about why GRS main focus is there. There is currently no cure for the HIV virus, but it is 100% preventable. HIV can be contracted through a few means including: sex, sharing needles or using infected needles, blood-to-blood contact, breastfeeding, etc. In medical terms, HIV turns into AIDS when your T-cell count (the cells that make up your immune system) drop below 200(normal is around 1,200-1,400 for average healthy person) AND you have an "opportunistic disease" (malaria, TB, yellow fever, etc.) Another encouraging fact that I didn't know is that you can go back and forth between technically having HIV and having AIDS, depending the above 2 factors, by taking treatment of ARV's or antiretroviral treatments. 67% of the world population with HIV or AIDS lives in Sub-Saharan Africa and 1 in 6 adults in South Africa are infected. You begin to realize that this disease effects everyone in this part of the world, whether they are infected, they know someone who is or who has passed away from AIDS or it is ravaging the community around them. In Zambia in particular, we have a large grant from the Elton John AIDS Foundation that funds us to have a large focus on a process of 1)Getting youth tested to know their status 2)If they are found positive then GRS immeditately refers them to a local partner organization that we work with that provides counseling and treatment 3)Continued education and knowledge about HIV to youth to create BEHAVIOR CHANGE.
Also, I'm gonna steal a little bit of info from one of our fellow interns that summarizes well the reasons this epidemic is occurring in Sub-Saharan Africa:
Why is HIV so prevalent in Africa?
- Concurrent relationship(relationships with multiple partners at the same time, but not necessarly more partners than many western cultures)
- Transactional sex (sugar daddies and/or older partners)
- Stigma
- Multiple myths, gaps in knowledge
- Traditions around sexual maturity age
- Rape
- Lack of government involvement
- Age disparate sex (partners that are 5+ years older)
- Ability to actually create behavior change, because these kids are all very smart they just need the tools and knowledge to change their risky behavior
In terms of the programs that GRS currently runs, their curriculum include 5 different types targeted at different youth:
1) Skillz
2) Generation Skillz
3) Skillz Street
4) Skillz Holiday
5) Skillz Testing Tournaments
--> You can go to the GRS website to learn a bit more about the curriculum's and about GRS as a whole! http://www.grassrootsoccer.org/what-we-do/skillz/
** And in Zambia they are about to roll out an amazing new intervention curriculum called Skillz Plus that works solely with youth who are HIV positive.
--> Partnerships: GRS does an amazing job of partnering with tons of organizations including, but not limited to:
- Nike
- Elton John AIDS foundation
- Barclays
- USAID
- UNHCR
- Comic Relief
- Peace Corps
- MLS
- EPL
- Exxon Mobil
- Etc.
Beyond all the info about GRS we had some time as an intern class to get to know each other and learn more about the reasons everyone signed up for GRS and what their specific sites will be like which include: Zambia, Lesotho, and five sites throughout South Africa. I could go on and on about all the work that GRS is doing and the innovative, humble and impactful manner that they are achieving their goal of behavior change in youth to build communities and a new generation that will hopefully see HIV and AIDS as a virus/disease of the past.
This is plenty for now, next up I'll fill y'all in a little bit on my wonderful life so far in Zambia!!
Lots of love,
Lots of love,
Caseface
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