Positively Creative at School for Life

On the morning of Tuesday, January 10th, filled with excitement and a bit of the unknown, seven of us from ARI hopped in the van for the one hour drive to School For Life’s campus in the hills outside of Chiang Mai. Described as “an officially recognized Social Welfare School, with a concept that has been described by the UNESCO as "…much needed world class innovative effort in the field of education."

Armed with a couple bins of crayons, magic markers, large pieces of poster board, an animated video and the hope to pass along information regarding HIV infection and AIDS to a group of teenaged young adults we arrived safely on the grounds and prepared ourselves as best as possible before the participants trickled in.

I’m David Berube, a Visual Artist from New York City, USA. I’m in Chiang Mai as a member of the inaugural team of Volunteer Positive. We are the first ever International organization comprised of openly HIV positive members and those affected by HIV doing service work around the world.

ARI is the very first volunteer experience I had while in Chiang Mai and School for Life was my very first workshop.

That's me on the left at our School for Life Workshop

After a few “warm up” activities, we dove into the presentation. The students viewed a brilliant short animation from Africa and dubbed in Thai, they played a True/False game based on common misconceptions regarding HIV infection, and a game representing how opportunistic infections can cause full-blown AIDS if you don’t take your ARV’s.

Everyone enjoyed playing the Opportunistic Infection Game!

After these exercises, the students were asked to break up into groups of five and were given the poster board, an assortment of drawing tools and were asked to draw what HIV represented to them.

When we started out, the group consisted of 15 young adults, 10 female, 5 male. By the end of the workshop, an additional 13 kids of various ages showed up along with their teachers, including a small group of 5 year olds who enthusiastically participated in the drawing portion of the project after an abbreviated explanation and lesson from Cee.

One of the School for Life's brainstorm boards.

When finished, a representative of each drawing group had the opportunity to come to the front of the class and explain what their drawings represented. Images ranged from dancing commons to persons laying sick in hospital beds. Words like "Protect" were written in large font in English and Thai.

One of the most amazing moments came at the very end of the workshop when we had all of the participants write down a question they wanted to anonymously ask regarding HIV/AIDS. The last question we pulled was, “Why were we asked to draw about and talk about HIV/AIDS?” This brilliant question afforded ARI the opportunity to explain exactly why we had trekked to School for Life there on this beautiful afternoon: to help them understand how to protect themselves from HIV, to help them understand that people with HIV are no different from everybody in this room and to show that, by taking your ARV’s, an HIV+ person can live a happy, healthy productive life.

Protect yourself! Stop HIV/AIDS!

Follow the blog in the next few weeks to see the development of this project and the mural we will be creating with School for Life!