Nice Weather at least

So much happened today that I should write about. First of all, they had a meeting with the city council a few days ago. The t-shirt was well received etc. But then someone got the mayor all alarmed about the stir that it would cause and that young children would see a cartoon condom picture… etc etc. Basically the same old way of thinking “if you don’t tell them anything about sex then they won’t have it”.
That didn’t work during communist times, it certainly doesn’t work now that sex is advertised on every corner. The whole point of the campaign is to have a little bit of shock value, but to give parents a chance to talk to kids about AIDS, condoms, and sex in the context of their own family values. Russian schools don’t have any kind of a sex-ed program... so the only way kids hear about it is on the street, from their friends, and on tv… Just as most of the research showed in the US, most parents think that they have talked to their kids about sex and that the kids know their feelings on it. But then when they survey the kids, only about half as many kids really did know/remember their parents’ opinions on the subject. Also my previous research showed that kids who knew their parents felt strongly about sex, drugs, etc, are substantially less likely to act against their values.
Anyway, so the mayor didn’t want us to use the t-shirts at all. I had a long talk with my colleagues about it and I felt strongly that we needed to have an AIDS training with the mayor. Everyone else in the council agreed that the t-shirts were needed as part of our prevention efforts… So they arranged another meeting with the mayor, but our team still couldn’t convince him to let the runners wear the shirts. BUT he agreed to let us give them to participants, 18 and older, at the end of the event,(who of course will never wear them on the street where kids would see them). At least that is something. I wore my t-shirt all day today and got a bunch of interested looks from people. I can only hope that other people will actually wear theirs too and be able to explain what they learned about HIV/AIDS transmission from our event.
Very sad for me after so much work. I feel like I got the rug pulled out from under me. I thought that we had city approval.
The other thing that happened was that Yulia and I had a heart to heart talk about her family situation yesterday and… I felt like my life situations seem so much easier than I thought. She has a son who is 3 and her husband is an alcoholic, but hasn’t come to terms with it yet. This is already her second marriage. She kinda rebounded quickly into her current husband’s arms and now wishes that she would have given herself more time to recover. Plus tomorrow is her birthday and she has more than a full time job. She has so many struggles that it makes mine seem puny… She had a little breakdown after work and was just sobbing… It’s really hard to comfort people in a foreign language. I did the best I could… Then I helped her do her shopping and dye her hair for tomorrow. That part was pretty fun of course.
Other typical Russian events have also happened recently… When I arrived their office was flooded. Things had leaked down from the 5th floor over the holiday. Today they had that all cleaned up and the power went out in the building right as we were printing the materials for the volunteer training meeting. So I had to unplug the copier and take it over to another building to print the materials from what we already had done... All that stuff with the city council taking back their approval was going on during this time too. It was nuts.
The pics are of Dennis digging in the window boxes and the training meeting we had with the youth volunteers.