peer support meeting

Last week end I attended a peer support meeting of the "allied health
volunteers". That is all the vso volunteers of the health program that
are not doctors or nurses. We are a small group of lab technicians,
lecturers or business advisors. We shared experiences about our jobs
and we had a couple of teachers giving us some advise in teaching
techniques (many of us we are lecturing but we don't have much
training about it) so it was very useful.
The best part came on saturday. Joyce (lecturer at the college of
health sciences in Lilongwe) had an idea for a community project:
Blood type the minibus drivers!! You have seen the pictures of those
doggy minibuses, and I have told you about them. You will be not
surprised then to know that many of them get involved in road
accidents. We thought that it would be very useful to test drivers at
the station to find their blood group and give them a little card that
they could keep with them. Then in case of accident they could be
attended faster at the hospital.
Joyce organised everything, the cards, all the materials for the
testing.. we set up the "lab" and "office" in the minibus station,
explained people what we wanted to do and started to produce cards!!!
The most difficult part was explaining people what was it for, and
what is a blood group. But also, that if your group is lets say, B +,
the positive does not stand for your HIV status.. so many people came
and we had 100 people tested in 2 hours, great success!
as usual, you can find some pictures in my site.