Mother's Day at Vidyanikethan

14th May 2006 – Mother’s Day …a significant occasion to admire the special person in everybody’s life – “Mother”.

On such a special day the iVolunteer-ASHA group decided to organize a memorable event for Rural Women on “Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV/AIDS” at Vidyanikethan (Society for Education & Social Development), Jaraganahalli, J.P. Nagar (Post), Bangalore.

Vidyanikethan is an NGO with an aim of uplifting the Social, Education, Health, Environmental and Economic status of the societies. It visualizes itself as working to enable the rural poor such as women, dalits, tribal landless labours and unemployed youths - to move towards sustainable development through over all increase in knowledge and quality of life, socio economic and personal status in society.

This event was also special to all of us because we were performing a Street Play as the primary mode of AIDS Awareness for the first time. In fact many of us were acting for the first time and some of the volunteers didn’t know kannada as well.…but we were all confident that the play would be a big hit since the storyline of the play was excellent.
The event started with a brief introduction of all the volunteers by Anna, followed by the street play.
The characters of the play were Husband & Wife – enacted by Vijayanand and Claire
Husband’s friends – enacted by Arun & Sayan
Baby’s Voice – Background voice given by Vinod
AIDS Counselor – enacted by Shilpa
Placards Display - by Gaurav & Archana

The most important scene of the play was “when the baby speaks to the father from the womb and conveys its anxiety about being HIV infected, because of the father’s loose character prior to marriage”. Everybody (all the women in the audience) loved this scene very much since it gave a strong emotional touch. (Thanks to Arun’s sister for giving us the storyline).

Then to add some filmy spice to the play Vinod came up with a funny remix of a superhit kannada song to remember ASHA Foundation’s AIDS Helpline numbers. This concluded the street play and the excellent acting skills of all the volunteers were very well applauded.

Then Vijayanand took over to give some in-depth knowledge about HIV/AIDS and stressed upon the need for counseling from a professional counselor before and after HIV testing. He also pointed out about the discrimination and stigma faced by HIV infected people from the society and the importance of awareness about HIV/AIDS in the society to eliminate such social reaction.
Finally Vijayanand, Shilpa and Vinod (the only 3 kannada speaking volunteers) answered all the questions and cleared all the doubts raised by the women.

We all were happy and satisfied to have celebrated Mother’s Day in such a wonderful way.