May 15 VCT

As I was watching the finals of last Saturday’s VCT event something struck me. In the span of just over four hours I had gone through the full cycle of human emotions.

At first I was panicked because so many things were missing and the event was about to start. Then I was disappointed because we had started so late and I thought this would affect the overall number of people that we could test. After this I started to feel happy and inspired as I watched all of our superstar GRS coaches and all of the amazing volunteers put so much energy and effort into salvaging our event. A short time later I was amazed at how much we had accomplished in such a short span of time with so many obstacles in front of us. Considering the circumstances last Saturday’s VCT event was as big a team effort as I’ve experienced in my life, and I’m truly speechless when I think about how thankful I am for everyone that participated. The kids, the GRS coaches, the Tingathe volunteers, the teachers…

For a while I really thought that the whole thing was going to be a disaster. If I’m being honest, there was probably a good 15 minutes when I thought we should all just pack up and call it a day before anything else went wrong.

Rachel and I arrived at the local primary school that would be hosting our event (Kalambo) at around 7 am and we immediately started setting up. The only problem was that nobody else showed up until around 9:30, a good thirty minutes after the scheduled start time. There was only so much we could do by ourselves so after a while it became clear that we would pretty much have to wait for all of the other pieces – the PA system, the kids, the village chiefs, the school teachers, our counselors and testers, the testing kits etc etc. The longer we took to get started the later into the day our tournament would go, and this is never a good thing when you consider how cranky and hangry people get if they stay too late past lunchtime without receiving any food.

Just to give you a good idea of how badly things were going at the start I’ll try to capture the first 15 minutes of the tournament. The tournament was supposed to start at 9:30 with four schools playing soccer games and the other four going through their counseling and testing sessions. Instead the games didn’t start until 10:30 and within the first thirty seconds of our first game a young girl passed out from overheating and exhaustion. At the same time the other four schools couldn’t go through their counseling or testing sessions because we were still waiting on the test kits to arrive. Additionally the PA system still wasn’t working because of some electrical problems. Normally we set up the PA system as early as possible to attract people and in theory get more community members tested. But on Saturday we weren’t able to get the PA system going until around 11:30. As you can imagine, things were not going as planned.

Ultimately, through a combination of hard work and teamwork, we were able to pull through all of these obstacles and host a successful event. In the end we managed to test 175 people, which is really an impressive number when you consider all of the obstacles and the fact that the particular area that we were working at was much harder to mobilize for testing. I think when this is all over and I’m back home thinking about Malawi and all the work we did here, I’m going to be particularly proud of last Saturday’s event. So many people did so many wonderful things to make the event a successful one and that’s why I’ll never forget it. People could have easily given up and blamed a lack of materials for the failure of the event. But instead the GRS and Baylor team rallied together and didn’t let the event fail. And because of that 175 people know their status and hundreds more have learned all about the behavior change needed to overcome HIV/AIDS.