This morning was our long anticipated HIV/AIDS workshop. A bunch of the site coordinators, peer leaders, and Sport In Action directors were in attendance. Sarah still didn’t have her voice, so I did most of the talking and Sarah whispered all of her input for me to say outloud. It actually worked out well given the circumstances. We went through all of the slides, explaining our program goals, curriculum, and highlighting the major findings our of questionnaire-based research. The Sport In Action audience was very shocked by some of the findings, especially at Chipata (i.e. 35% of girls reported feeling that they’d have to have sex for money at some point in their lives, etc.). They were also very interested in hearing our opinions as to why there were such large disparities between the responses of the Tionge and Chipata students.
We concluded the workshop with a long question and answer period. Sarah and I were both really excited to see how interested the Sport In Action team seemed to be in all of our findings. I was especially happy when Frank, the director, said that he thought this was an excellent opportunity to continue more HIV/AIDS education in the future. He said that SIA had been focusing a lot on sport and coaching recently, but one of their missions is to improve HIV knowledge and the data we produced showed that the need for information was definitely there. It felt good to finally show everyone what we’ve been working so hard to produce. We gave Mwape all of our data and documents and promised to put together more thorough lesson plans for peer leaders to use in the future.
After the workshop, we got fritas (the fried balls of dough) from the Kabwata market and walked to Fountain of Hope. Sarah eventually left for basketball. I stayed there for the rest of the afternoon before meeting Francis at the office. We bought about 35 pieces of fruit to use for a fruit salad for tomorrow’s lunch party and then we went to Arcades to meet Sarah.
From Sarah: Today was my last day of practice with the Spartans for both my U-15 team and my senior team. The practice with the younger ones was great and I had my largest turnout thus far. By the end there were 10 boys there and we were able to end with a scrimmage. Afterwards I got a white t-shirt I had written “Spartans” on and had them all sign the back. I also gave them cookies I had bought and we took a lot of pictures. They were sad and said they didn’t want me to go because “it’s going to be bad,” but I assured them that they would be fine. The older team’s practice was really good too. We prepped for their game on Sunday going over offenses and I taught them a new in-bounds play. I asked the captain what he wanted to name the play and at the exact same time he and two others all said “Sarah.” It was so cute. We then practiced running through Sarah a bunch of times and then scrimmaged. At the end of practice when we had our team huddle they told me that they had chosen a Zambian name for me. They said that they had picked it as a team and it came from their hearts. It was a name that stood for what I meant to them, and the name was “Dalitso.” Dalitso means blessing. They then told me that I had to give the team prayer as their Dalitso.
We reunited at Arcades to buy last minute groceries for tomorrow and then meet our wonderful host, Mubanga, for dinner. We had a really good time and talked for the entire time about the most random topics, from life in Zambia to Mubanga’s future trip to Disneyworld. We got fancy drinks and even dessert before we left to visit a local bar that Mubanga wanted to show us.
It was a really cool place, very “African” and boasting the coolest decorations and music ever! Sarah and I were very pumped. Two of Mubanga’s friends were there, and they insisted on buying Sarah and I three margaritas each before we were saved by the onset of a migraine for Sarah (Never thought I’d be happy to discover that Sarah was getting a migraine—on this one occasion it saved us from drinking way more than we wanted to). We thanked Mubanga’s friends for their generosity and returned to the house. Sarah went to lie down in the dark for a while I sat down to cut up every single piece of fruit for the fruit salad (while listening to fun dance party music of course). By the time Sarah came into the kitchen to visit me, I’d finished the fruit salad and just took a batch of brownies out of the oven. We went to bed at 2:30 a.m., tired but confident that we’d have time to finish preparing the rest of our lunch the following morning.
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