Ayleen Zapata has just received her BA degree after majoring in Anthropology and minoring in Community Action and Social Change as well as Women’s Studies. She will be pursuing a Master’s degree in Public Health in Health Administration and Policy. Her piece is entitled “Coming Full Circle,” and it is about her experience in teaching the staff of Jamaica Aids Support and JFLAG. Enjoy.
Enjoy,
Nesha Z.Haniff
Director, Pedagogy of Action
—
Coming Full Circle
By Ayleen Zapata
This past week was our first week of teaching in Kingston, Jamaica. We taught the HIV module for the organizations of JASL and JFLAG which we split up into four groups and my group consisted of the staff members of both organizations. I thought teaching the module would be somewhat difficult. We also had to build rapport; I had some concerns that I would be too young to teach older people. After teaching the module to them they really took a liking to the module. They did awesome in their mini groups and were able to get to know each other better. They even added creativity and their personality to the module which impressed me and made it feel natural when they presented it.
I do feel that they would use the module in the future to teach others that are not as knowledgeable about HIV/AIDS. They loved the fact that it was simple, precise, and straight to the point and also talked about the stigma related to HIV/AIDS. Today, was our third and last day with this group and one of the staff members named Richard actually told us that he used one of the steps in the module to answer someone’s question about contracting HIV during sex. He was able to demonstrate a part of the module that answered the question for this person. At this moment I personally felt accomplished and I am pretty sure my group felt the same way because he was able to use the methods of the module after two days of learning it. This morning I can also say that we probably had the fastest learner of the HIV module. Kandasi who is the CEO of JASL was not able to attend all the sessions but she made it an effort to learn the module. Our students (staff group) that we taught her the module and she was able to teach it back immediately. I was entranced of how easy she was able to catch on. The fact that it took me so long to learn this module and she was able to do it in less than 30 minutes caused me to reflect on myself.
