Teen Club

I know I’ve been absolutely terrible about keeping in touch recently but I have a good excuse – work has been insane lately! In addition to organizing two more VCT tournaments next month (first on May 8th and second on May 29th) we’ve been trying to revamp Teen Club and oversee all of the interventions that our coaches have been running in the schools.

Rachel and I have hardly been in the office recently between school visits, meetings with professional Malawian soccer stars and other work related trips. Just this morning we met with two Malawi national team stars and both of them signed up to join our team at the May 8 VCT. I can only imagine how excited the kids are going to be when they see these national superstars coaching their teams!

Apart from all of the work that goes into organizing VCT tournaments, I’ve been spending a lot of time with the Teen Club program at Baylor Hospital. I’m not sure if any of you remember so I’ll briefly describe it again – Teen Club is basically a program that takes place on the 3rd Saturday of every month. The day starts at 8:00 am and it runs until 2:30 pm. During the day, we’ll give the kids enough ARV treatment to last them two months but we also are trying to think of activities to keep them engaged in the day even after they get their medication. My job has been to try and think of fun activities for the kids to do when they’re at Baylor. We’re trying to create a system where half of the activities are fun and the other half involve important key messages about stuff like adherence, stigma and relationships. That way the kids who come will have a lot of fun, but can also take a lot of important information away from the day.

I recently sat down and talked to a couple of the guardians who bring their HIV+ kids to Teen Club and talked to them about what they liked about Teen Club. I’m not sure what I was expecting them to say but their answers absolutely blew me away and made the room awfully dusty. The guardians were basically saying that they loved Teen Club because it was the one place where their kids could be kids. They kept saying that everywhere else their kids were scared to be themselves because of the potential repercussions but at Baylor they could stop worrying and just hang out with kids who understand them.


After being here for nine months and working at Teen Club every month you definitely get a sense for how much the kids enjoy coming to Teen Club. They get all dressed up and jump around when they see their friends for the first time in four weeks. Its pretty amazing to see how excited they get and to see how much they enjoy Teen Club, and the whole thing makes you wonder just how bad things are for them outside of the Baylor grounds. As much as I love Teen Club, sometimes I wish that there was an HIV+ friendly environment that was open every day.


All right, well that’s it for me today. I’m going to do my best to update this blog more regularly. In the meantime I hope everyone is doing well and I really hope that winter is finally starting to go away!