Let Your Light Shine

How do you dispel the damaging myths surrounding HIV and AIDS? How do you teach communities that children suffering from HIV or AIDS didn't do anything to deserve it? What's the best way to make sure children living with or orphaned by HIV or AIDS get the most loving care and support?

I’ll tell you – Let Your Light Shine.

Given its name because it's all about helping kids to realise their value and live in the light of it, Let Your Light Shine is a video-based tool that helps train caregivers to provide better care for children suffering from or affected by HIV and AIDS. Suffering from this disease comes with heavy stigma in Africa, where many people don't have correct facts about the causes and spread of HIV and AIDS. As a result, many children who have been orphaned by AIDS or are living with it themselves are kept out of school or treated differently by the people who should be taking care of them.

Let Your Light Shine is being used to dispel myths about AIDS among caregivers. It also teaches caregivers how to provide the special love and support that these children require, and how to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS. When one or two people from a church, local project or other non-governmental organisation are trained in Let Your Light Shine, they're encouraged to go teach others in their field how to care for children suffering from HIV and AIDS too.

Viva's networks across Africa are the perfect way to get Let Your Light Shine training into many hands at once.  In June Viva posted a blog about how Let Your Light Shine took off in Uganda - from one training session where 58 people were trained, more than 1000 adults learned to care for children affected by HIV and AIDS.

A Viva network can advertise to a specific group of projects and churches that care or children, and it can use representatives of its member projects to teach workers from other projects who couldn't attend the training. You could say it's like the 'grapevine'. Before long, thousands of extremely vulnerable children are benefiting from the training those 58 people received from Viva.

Picture this: one man attends Let Your Light Shine training with Viva. He goes back to his office at AIDS Care Education and Training (ACET) in Zimbabwe, where he teaches his co-workers what he learned. ACET holds a Let Your Light Shine training for 20 more pople These people represent 10 different projects in the area.  That's 10 projects filled with children who will directly benefit from their caregivers' new knowledge!

And it doesn't stop there; those 20 workers will keep telling other people. And those people will tell other people. And so it goes on. The 20 people who attended ACET's training session had only one complaint: that they couldn't get enough of the information in one day and they wanted more time! They'll be attending three more training days throughout the year.

Each person who attends a Let Your Light Shine training session with Viva has a similar story. It's spreading through Tanzania, South Africa, Malawi, Uganda, Zambia...

The great thing about Let Your Light Shine is that it gives child care workers the skills and information they need to protect and care for children suffering from HIV or AIDS and their effects. And the great thing about networks is that they let these trained caregivers pass on their knowledge to one another, multiplying the investment put into the original training. Networks make caring for children more efficient and more comprehensive. We're seeing this in action as Let Your Light Shine spreads across more and more African cities, helping more and more children to let their lights shine!

Learn more about Viva's work with children with HIV and AIDS at www.viva.org/Shine