SKILLZ Plus

I mentioned in one of my first posts that GRS Zambia is working on developing a curriculum geared towards HIV positive kids.  Once this is complete GRS will offer comprehensive coverage in the fight against HIV.  As I mentioned before, this comprehensive coverage is education, pretest counseling, testing, referrals to treatment for people testing positive, and finally an HIV positive curriculum, which is meant to educate HIV positive people on how to live smart, healthy, positive lifestyles.  This will be HUGE for the fight against HIV and a big step towards reaching our goal of an AIDS free generation.

Recently we have been making a big push to complete this HIV positive curriculum.  And I’m lucky to be one of the 3 people involved in creating this curriculum.  We have realized in the past few days what a large task this is.  Because of the psychological volatility of the situation, nearly every detail of what is said to these kids must be analyzed 10 times over because we can’t risk triggering a negative reaction.  One misstep could cause a patient to stop going to the clinic or taking their ARVs, and could cause their lives to spiral out of control.  If 1,000 kids go through our SKILLZ curriculum (our standard curriculum delivered to kids whose status is unknown but the vast majority are HIV negative) education and prevention curriculum and 10% reject it, not a huge deal.  If 1,000 HIV positive kids go through our HIV+ curriculum and 10% reject it, there’s now 100 kids whose lives we have effectively ruined.  That simply cannot happen.

It’s an incredible experience and its been a blast trying to come up with fun and effective games.  We still have a few kinks to work out but if we keep going at this rate and with this quality were going to nail it.  I look forward to reporting back the results once we get it into the field.