Leon is the fourth stop in the five-town Project Abot Kamay, which brings Team Dugong Bughaw’s HIV awareness campaign to Iloilo province.
ILOILO CITY, Philippines–High school students in Leon, a town in the central part of Iloilo province, learned more about knowing the science and stopping the stigma on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) through Team Dugong Bughaw’s (TDB) Project Abot Kamay (PAK).
For this stop, TDB partnered with the Leon National High School (LNHS) Supreme Secondary Learner Government, as well as the school’s clubs, organizations, and its Grade 12 curriculum.
TDB’s ‘kuyas and ates’, who were capacitated on basic HIV information, stigma and discrimination, mental health, and were exposed to connecting with communities, shared their knowledge and experiences with the students.
Teachers also attended and listened to the talks, and one of them, Teacher II Jamaica Canto, said that her knowledge on HIV also improved through learning the basics.
She said that the talks given by the TDB resource persons made more impact on male students, whom she noted to have negative stigma on HIV prior to the organization’s visit.
“I think there is [change] especially to our male students because some of them were really open-minded about [having paid intercourse with gay men], where that scenario is normal for them. So I think the talk really helped to open the minds of students about [the] consequences of not having safe sex,” Canto said.
PAK aims to address HIV through a combination prevention approach that integrates biomedical, behavioral, and structural interventions.
The project brings TDB’s flagship Project High Five (PHF) outreach awareness program to areas outside the provincial capital, Iloilo City, where the latter was initiated in 2015.
From the simple awareness-raising goal of PHF, PAK expands the advocacy by also talking about mental health.
This article is written with the aid of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the purpose of this website.
