Posted on March 03, 2015
Source: Yanzi Xiao
Hello everyone! My name is Yanzi and I’m a graduate student at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. I became interested in HIV since I worked as a summer intern at China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To most people back home, HIV/AIDS is still a disgraceful topic to discuss, making it extremely difficult to do outreach work. I joined Generation Tomorrow because I was extremely curious about how HIV outreach work is done in the US.
I have been assigned to Project RE_, which is a community-based organization that offers free HIV testing and counseling on a mobile unit. The hardest thing I had to do while working for Project RE_ is get out of my comfort zone. Most of our outreach and recruitment is at LGBT bars, and at first I felt really uncomfortable going up to complete strangers asking them if they would like a free HIV test. But later I realized that people were actually quite friendly and sometimes they even come up to me first. Project RE_ taught me that HIV outreach work is all about building trust with the community and letting people know that we will be there for them.
