In early December, I celebrated a one-year milestone as both a Peace Corps volunteer and as Technical and M&E Adviser for Education Fights AIDS International (EFA) in Cameroon. Reaching such a milestone seems to necessitate …

By Doumtigai Guibai, translated by Gena Barnabee – EFA Peer Educator

EFA Peer Educators at gender training in Maroua
My husband died from a disease that we didn’t understand; after medical exams, the results showed that we …

It is widely accepted that gender strongly influences the spread of HIV and the ways communities respond to it.  Gender and sexual based inequalities, norms, and violence increase vulnerability to HIV while limiting ability to …

by Caitlyn Bradburn, Technical Advisor
MAROUA, CAMEROON — HIV is not the death-sentence it once was.  Anti-retroviral medications (ARVs) are free to those who qualify and recent research shows that young people, especially, in Cameroon have …

Education Fights AIDS is a truth that has many explanations.  EFA’s work is based on the belief that education can impact people on many levels: individuals, families, communities, nations, and globally.

Individual: Helping HIV+ people to …

Healing, in the anthropological sense, is a multi-sensorial process that carries an individual along the continuum from illness to wellness. In the case of people living with HIV or AIDS, “wellness” cannot be defined as an absence of the virus or as the success of a “cure”. Rather, a more holistic definition of “wellness” should be employed. A person living with HIV or AIDS is in a state of “wellness” when he or she has embraced a whole sense of him or herself and moved from a state of despair and confusion to hope and self-reclamation. The associations in the EFA network strive to create deeper, truer connectivity to self and others. As such, the associations offer an opportunity for people infected with HIV or AIDS to come into a state of wellness…