We visit a school were a theater play takes place. A large proportion of the population is from a group called the Garifuna.
The Center of Promotion of Family Health, which covers the departments Colón and Atlántida and is a subrecipient of Global Fund financing. The GF money goes to the training of artists, organizing of cultural events, and condom distribution. The center has developed a cultural prevention “package”, which includes:
• Training of identified artists to deliver HIV prevention messages
• Developing a script (on a local level), over which the artists themselves have ownership
• Info materials

Delivery of these messages through theater plays seems like a perfect fit for the Garifuna population. They appear to love plays like the one we saw this evening. The program started in April 2014.

The department of Colón consists of 10 townships (total population: 315,000 in 2014), one of them is Tocoa, where we will visit several villages (Prieta, Lérida, and Chiripa). 65 health centers in total in the department. 2 Hospitals, 17 large health centers, rest are rural centers. The policy is that everybody who has a fever gets tested for malaria. Last year, 42000 tests were done in Colon. 1187 were positive. In the township of Tocoa, 10,077 tests were done, 460 positive. The Global Fund supports control of breeding sites, surveillance activities, testing of patients, and mosquito nets, among other things - not the medicine.