Rose Festival

Rose Festival, May 5, 2010

This is quite outdated but since it was a success I want to share it with you. At the beginning of May the Annual, three day, RoseValley Rose Festival took place. This is often a great venue for Peace Corps Volunteers to do health related/community projects. Moroccan tourists come to town from across the country. Main highlights include a parade, the crowning of Miss Rose, and nightly concerts. For us PCVs in the region it would become the stage for an AIDS awareness/ testing campaign.

We started planning “the Rose Festival Project” in January after a regional meeting. Our goals were to dispel myths related to SIDA (the French acronym for AIDS,) to discuss modes of transmission and methods of prevention. We were lucky to work closely with a Moroccan organization to ensure community interest and participation and in hopes of some sort of sustainability.

Some of the main parts of planning included coming up with talking points, training our Moroccan volunteers and medical professionals on up to date information on SIDA, attaining a tent from which to work, and getting in contact with ALCS an organization that does testing for SIDA as well as awareness campaigns.

We worked for days upon days on this project but it was well worth the work we put in. Several days before the festival we gathered our entire team of Moroccan medical professional and a doctor from one of the surrounding hospitals came in to give a training on SIDA. We prepared in advance “difficult questions/statements,” that our volunteers could expect to receive and it was followed by discussion. Questions /statements included, I’m Muslim, Allah (God) will protect me. SIDA is a foreigner’s disease. My only partner is my husband, can I still get SIDA? Etc… We felt it was important to prepare volunteers for questions they could face. Despite some arguing the training went well.

The first day of the Rose Festival we got up early, marched over to the field that would be hosting tents, and set up our large, wedding tent. It had a divider down the middle so that we could have two sides, a men’s side and a women’s side. This would help us reach more people since we could man the men’s tent with men and the women’s tent with women, providing a more comfortable and culturally appropriate atmosphere. We had two Peace Corps volunteers, two Moroccan youth volunteers and a medical professional on each side of the tent at all times.

The youth volunteers were really what made the whole experience. Without them we could not have reached nearly as many people and the project would not have been a success the way that it was. The students were excited and motivated. Many of them were proactive in calling people into the tents, going through different brochures and answering questions related to SIDA. We spent 3 days form 9am-to between 6-8pm reaching out to people in the community and trying to educate them on SIDA.

All the while, next to our tent ALCS was providing free SIDA testing. Anyone was allowed to go get tested and afterwards they were provided with condoms. We were also handing out condoms, despite some controversy. We felt it was important if people wanted them, we should provide them. There was of course the age old argument, “if you are handing out condoms, you are encouraging people to have sex,” to which we replied with the age old response, “People will have sex whether or not we give them condoms. They may as well be educated and have a way to protect themselves.”

People were far more receptive to the information we were handing out than I expected. We originally expect to reach about 250 people. Ambitious, right!? In the end we reached 2560 people! We talked to 1250 men, 476 boys (15 and under) 681 Women and 153 girls. It’s hard for us to measure how much information people retained and if there was an increase in condom usage but as far how many people we shared information with, we are very proud of the outcome.