Saturday, May 31, 2008

FINALLY!!! some direction

So, a week later, and I still haven't had that meeting. One of the leaders got into an accident, so we kept postponing the it. Finally, I got fed up and so did Hans, so he came up with an idea for me. He decided to combine DISHA and SureStart by using the community health workers from both programs as resources. We want to conduct an HIV/AIDS knowledge assessment in the slums, as well as an assessment on the relationship between pregnant women and the associated stigma and discrimination that comes with being HIV+. So, a working draft of the overall question that would be posed to the women in the slums would look something like this, "Can HIV+ women become pregnant and have children and should they?" The community health workers from both programs will conduct these interviews and the results will be used to create a new HIV/AIDS awareness program for the slum dwellers or to improve the already existing awareness program that SureStart has. The aim is to disprove these myths and to get rid of the stigma and discrimination surrounding HIV+ pregnant women in the slums.
So right now, I'm doing a little bit of background research on programs/ interviews/ questionnaires etc. that have already been done so that I can successfuly obtain data that can will be useful in creating an awareness program. I still need to obtain the report on the survey of women that SureStart has collected in order to determine the population size that I need collect data from, but that may not happen till Monday (at the earliest).

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