Vanessa Garcia, a.k.a. “Africa” is the female star of the play. Ever since she was a teenager she worried about the wellbeing of her community. She can very much identify with her character, who loses a dear friend to HIV. She was involved in theatre performances since the age of 10, and finds it a very effective and direct way of communicating important messages such as those about HIV. She allow finds it to helpful that a medium like this can create more in-depth relationships with her audience. “Audiences have been very accepting”, she says, “I can really feel the change in youth” She had people coming up to her saying “I don’t want to end up like Julia. So I’m going to be careful.” Julia is the name of Africa’s character in a previous play. Africa says there is still much stigma, but not as much as in other places. She has seen examples of stigma in places like hospitals, where some HIV patients have been separate from others.

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.