“We told them everything. We didn’t sugar-coat anything,” Justin AugustÃn said of the way he and other youth trainers talked to young people about the sexual transmission of HIV. They used visual aids (held by team member Mykeda Rogers, 20, of New Haven) to demonstrate how to put on male and female condoms. Members of the team finished their eight-week program with a celebration on Friday at AIDS Project New Haven.
AugustÃn (pictured) lost a cousin to AIDS. He wanted to understand more about the disease, so he jumped at the chance to be part of a youth peer education team this summer at AIDS Project New Haven (APNH), where he learned an in-your-face approach to teaching HIV/AIDS prevention to other young people.
The teens spoke to individuals they approached on the street as well as to groups in organized summer activities. What was the response? AugustÃn, who’ll be a senior at Regional Career High School in New Haven, said, “When you bring up the topic HIV, of course some people are going to feel uncomfortable and walk away, but then there were people who actually wanted to hear about what was going on. When we mentioned that New Haven has the second highest rate of HIV in the state, people got shocked. That’s what caught their attention, and they started listening.” New Haven has reported 2,455 cases of AIDS since the disease appeared on the scene.
The six peer advocates received certificates for their accomplishment, which will qualify them for possible future employment with Planned Parenthood or another health agency, AugustÃn said. The program was funded by a grant from the United Way, through a youth philanthropy program that supports youth leadership.
AugustÃn says losing his first cousin last year was a wake-up call. “Before the program I was sort of ignorant about it. Then we went through HIV 101, and it hit me hard, because a lot of people I go to school with could have it, but they don’t know they have it, and now we’re reaching out to them to tell them how to stop it, and handing out things to protect themselves and tell them to get tested every three months. All of us got tested [all were negative], and we were just sharing stories.”
Nitza Agosto, director of education and outreach services at APNH (pictured), was busy putting the finishing touches on the decorations for the graduation. She said since youth comprise the demographic with one of the highest HIV transmission rates, it’s critical to reach them with potentially life-saving information, and that was the job of the peer educators.
“They would go to these programs and do presentations in the form of speeches, in the form of games,” Agosto said, “different kinds of things in order to get the knowledge across to youth that this is a serious disease.”
