A Partnership with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church to Combat HIV/AIDS
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Taking this Intervention to Ethiopia

  • After the church leaders see how successful this event is, we will ask them to do this same event in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia.
  • We will ask for  2 priests and 1 deacon  to go to Ethiopia and have  the same type of conference with the main churches out there. The priests in Ethiopia will likely change their attitudes about HIV prevention activities and workshops if priests come and participate in the conference rather than only having community activists and youth participate.
  • We will have this conference in Ethiopia sometime in December, which will give my friends and I some time to work with the priests in Los Angeles to understand how we should tailor our efforts for this conference in a way this is CULTURALLY APPROPRIATE because the priests in Ethiopia are more likely fixed in their ways.
  •  In our time of preparation, we will contact public health students in Addis Abeba's University and ask them to give us pointers about which churches we should target, and ask them to conduct pre-intervention surveys at some churches out there so we can understand their notions of HIV, stigma, prevention activities,a couple months before the conference to understand how much the church members know and don't know about HIV/AIDS, myths, prevention strategies and what their church tells them about condoms.
  • The whole point of this conference will be to get rid of stigma attached to condoms and make sure everyone knows it is the only way to prevent STDS/HIV/AIDS besides abstinence. The conference will cover the same topics from the LA conference.If this goes well, maybe plan for future workshops with the partnership of the church, ensuring them that these workshops will emphasize A and B, but will make sure people know about what C can do, its benefits, and especially about the female condom because  females are twice more likely to be infected, polygamous relationships are very prevalent and women are scared of asking the man to wear a condom.
  • EVALUATION: A week after both conferences we will pass out questionnaires at the churches and ask questions to see if we should do this type of conference annually and compare their pre and post questions to see how much they've learned at the conference.
Budget for LA Conference: restaurants will donate food and chairs, shouldn't be more than $300 for miscellaneous, decorations etc.
Budget for Ethiopia Conference
: take an offering to send over 2 priests and 1 deacon, hotel and food: $20/person. need 10,000     Will pay for flights and hotel, food and pay for public health assistants to pass out questionnaires