Amour & Vie

Amour & Vie is a program run by ABMS/PSI. The focus of this program is getting the message out to the Beninese population about health and sanitation issues, mostly by getting teens and young adults interested in these important messages. Using the project Amour & Vie – ABMS/PSI distributes a monthly magazine about sexual health issues for teens and they also do a radio show.. occasionally they also throw events and do tours of the country.

Peace Corps Benin partners with ABMS/PSI for what they call the “Activités Communautaires Amour & Vie” – aka community activities. ABMS  wants to reach out to villages and Peace Corps has lots of Americans living in these villages praying for something useful to do. Match made in heaven.

Every year there is the opportunity for 12 non-health volunteers to select a community team and participate in this program (all health volunteers do this program but their training is separate).

A community team is: 1 Community Counselor – someone who lives and works and is respected in the community.. and 2 Peer Educators – two “high school” students from the community between the ages of 18-24, one girl and one boy, who will be in charge of going out in the community and giving health demonstrations.

The reason (I think) this program is so great is that, while I organize the team and am here to monitor the team for the first year.. it is not MY team. It is their team. They decide what they want to talk to the community about and what groups they want to focus with. I am just here to report back to Peace Corps and ABMS on their progress. The program also gives an amazing opportunity to the two students who over the next year will learn to be leaders, become very comfortable speaking in public (about sensitive subjects at that!), and who will hopefully also become looked up to by their peers. People in the communities are much more likely to really listen to these community groups then to me (if I were to give the present the same discussion or demonstrations).. aside from the fact that they speak the local languages.. they also live in the village and understand life here in a way that I never will. They are the heart of this program.. the future starts with them.

This past week was our training (a very long week of training and all of the new Peer Educators were really really awesome!!) The community groups learned about HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Family Planning, Nutrition and also Diarrhea (specifically infant diarrhea) and how to present these topics to groups in the community. There were some amazing guest speakers who stopped by, and a really dynamic team from last year who came in to talk to the students about their experience as an Amour & Vie team. By the end of they were doing practice demonstrations... and we even went out into Parakou to practice working with real people (as opposed to just practicing in front of the staff and volunteers). Even the really timid students were comfortable and confident presenting in front of each other. This made me feel great about the training, since even if the teams fall through or don't go as planned, as occasionally (but only occasionally) happens.. all of the students learned some truly invaluable lessons this week. Lessons that will stick with them.

Now it's time for my team to start planning our Kick-Off Ceremony for August!!

I can't wait!
Z