One morning in 1997, when I was in Senior Secondary School, my class teacher entered the class, cleared his throat and announced that 4 students have been selected to benefit in an HIV/AIDS training and workshop.

He reeled out the names and fortunately, my name was one of them. Before then, I knew next to nothing on HIV/AIDS. I couldn’t even explain what the acronym HIV/AIDS stood for. I possibly have heard about it in the news or read it in the papers.

Two weeks later, all that changed, I was trained as a peer educator and then suddenly I understood the danger that HIV/AIDS portends to the society especially young people like me. I was 14 years old.

Months later, I visited one of my instructors at the workshop, who is a Medical Doctor at his clinic, I was very curious. I have asked him times without number about how people living with HIV/AIDS look like and if there is anyone living with the virus in Ilesa (my home town). I sat beside a young pretty woman in his office, waiting for my turn to see the Doctor, I was last on the queue because I was not in the hospital for a medical appointment.

On asking the doctor once more, about whether there are people living with HIV/AIDS in my community, he responded by telling me that the woman I was sitting with a few minutes ago was living with HIV and in fact that she has gone public with her status.

I screamed! Despite my training, I was so scared and afraid, I felt like taking a plunge into a pool and cleansing myself immediately, I was visibly disturbed. The doctor kindly restated that HIV/AIDS cannot be contacted by mere sitting with people living with HIV/AIDS or talking to them or even hugging them. What I learnt that day was more valuable to me than the 5-day training I did on HIV/AIDS. Although the training provided me with theoretical knowledge on HIV/AIDS, my encounter with someone living with HIV/AIDS changed my perspective.

In 2004, while I was in the University and was involved as President of The Intellectual Group in planning an HIV/AIDS awareness project with other youth groups on campus, I insisted that as part of our project, we should look for and invite people living with HIV/AIDS to come and speak to the students so that the message can make as much impact that it made with me several years back.

On December 1 2004, The Intellectual Group and 6 other youth groups organized an HIV/AIDS awareness program to coincide with the World AIDS Day. As part of the program, we trained 70 volunteers, organized a red-ribbon campaign, embarked on a massive campus wide awareness campaign, held a seminar and concluded with a rave.

During the awareness rally, we invited students to the seminar, explaining to them that people living with HIV/AIDS will be speaking at the event. Out of curiosity, so many students numbering around 600 attended the event.

In the middle of the seminar, after a lecture by Medical personnel on what HIV/AIDS is, how it can be contacted and how it can be prevented, the compere mounted the stage and invited the 2 Positively Living People that we invited for the seminar on stage. One of them was the lady I met six years ago. They were not introduced as people living with HIV/AIDS.

As soon as they got on stage, one of them announced that he is HIV positive and that he is proud of himself. The entire hall fell silent. Over the next forty minutes, they told their stories. How they got infected. How they have stayed healthy despite the infection. At the end of their session, the over 600 students gave them a standing ovation.

What happened next was dramatic, I knew that most of the people in the hall were seeing for the first time, people living with HIV/AIDS, as one of the organizers, I mounted the stage and gave the facilitators a huge hug. People screamed. (Some friends avoided shaking my hand for days). However, the message was clear. After they left the stage, they were treated like a visiting Head of State, students lined up to either give them a handshake or a hug. We had to stop them after a while because they were disrupting the flow of the program.

Days after, we were inundated with calls from students who wanted to know their HIV status. Unfortunately, the school health centre does not offer such niceties. The few clinics that offered HIV testing and counseling charged 500 Naira (around 3 dollars). As much as we tried, we did not get the university to offer free HIV testing and counseling to the students.

Since then, we continued the HIV/AIDS project yearly and today the efforts have paid off. There are 2 clinics that now offer HIV testing and counseling for 100 naira (less that 1 dollar) and a medical centre that offers free testing at regular intervals.

I cannot claim that our efforts solely led to such progress, but I am sure that because we pioneered and sustained a youth-led HIV/AIDS awareness project in Ogbomoso, it has contributed in no small way to the little success recorded especially as regards testing and counseling.

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