trick-or-treat

I went back to the UN today. Just kidding! It was another lunchtime seminar. This one was on male sexual networks in Hanoi. If one can draw see networks of sexual partners in a given area, then one can better understand how to disseminate information about HIV prevention and self-protection. It's really amazing that this research is happening.

In the United States in the early 80s when the first cases of AIDS were recognized in gay communities in San Francisco, there was this toxic belief that AIDs was killing "all the right people." At that time, the epidemic was localized to gay men, African-Americans and Haitian immigrants. I remember hearing Cleve Jones (gay rights and AIDS awareness activist) speak at UNC saying that this phrase was even on bumper stickers in San Francisco. Not only are there a host of issues with this statement, not the least of which is the fact that the targeted populations are, in fact, people and deserve to be treated as such, but also the ignorance rears its ugly head in believing that the epidemic was going to stay in those populations. The thing is, injecting drug users also have sex. Men who have sex with men can also have sex with women. People of different races have sex with each other. Do you see the trend here? We've come a long way, but I'm just saying that sometimes we need to get real and be honest about what's happening so that we can dialogue about how to best solve problems.

Because today is actually Halloween, we did some Halloween-related activities with the kids in English class. We explained costumes and trick-or-treating as well as pumpkin carving. Because we didn't have pumpkins to carve, we ended up drawing monsters instead. It's still artsy, but doesn't involve knives. Each person would go up and draw one part of the monster. They were hilarious! The kids would laugh hysterically as each new part of the monster was added. Kim's mother, who visited this past week, had brought candy to Hanoi from the States, so we brought the candy to kids. There were Snickers, Kit Kats, M&Ms, and Reeses Cups. Kim went outside the room, we lined the kids up, and got the kids to knock on the door, say "trick-or-treat," and then do something scary before they could get their candy. They did an amazing job and certainly earned their candy!

The funniest part of this was that none of them like the Reeses Cups, solidifying the fact that these children are not from the States. Not a single one of them liked the peanut butter cups. This boggles my mind. Maeve, Kim and I decided that this was because there isn't actually peanut butter here. For a country with so many peanuts, there is almost no peanut butter, unless it is imported, and what is from here is really oily and not pleasant. It was still a crazy realization that they didn't like the peanut butter cups.