Kovsie HIV/Aids: Awareness Campaign
Students with Tarryn Nel from the Health and Wellness Centre
As part of their MDP322 service learning module, students undertook a project to bring more awareness to the HIV/Aids pandemic amongst service workers at the University. This project was done in collaboration with the Kovsie HIV/Aids Centre.
Group 1: HIV/Aids and Gender
The University of the Free State is one of the campuses that offer a lot of help and assistance to people infected with HIV/Aids, but little to those affected by the pandemic. Because of this the affected often feel marginalised having to deal with their own emotions.
The focus of the campaign was to make the affected aware that help for them is also available.
The outcome of this awareness campaign was that an empowerment group for the affected was established, starting in full effect with their sessions during the second semester of 2012. In these sessions issues dealt with by the affected will be discussed.
Group 2: HIV/Aids awareness campaign for service workers
Service workers at the UFS, for many reasons, apparently have little or distorted knowledge about HIV/Aids. They, however, have many questions related to it as determined by students during a situation analysis. This lack of knowledge was addressed during an information session where all the questions service workers had related to the pandemic, was addressed.
This launch will be followed up by eight more sessions to be handled by the HIV/Aids Centre on campus. As these service workers are part of the staff corps of the University, the Centre committed themselves that they will on a regular basis equip service workers with all new knowledge regarding HIV/Aids.