Last updated: April 4, 2011 6:51 pm
Aaron Yeo — The Gateway (University of Alberta)
EDMONTON (CUP) — First-year nursing students chose coloured pencils over scalpels last week in an activity designed to teach them about HIV-AIDS in their community.
In a session hosted by HIV Edmonton, a local support group for those suffering from HIV, more than 30 nursing students from the University of Alberta spent an afternoon tracing outlines of each other and expressing their personal stories with a variety of markers, pastels and crayons in a process called body mapping.
After removing their shoes and sitting on the floor, the students were encouraged to be freely creative in the body mapping activity.
“There are no barriers. You can’t make a mistake in this process,” said Lynn Sutankayo, a U of A alumna who led the session. “It’s really just fun and play and just going with it, letting your guard down. Which I know is different [from] university classrooms.”
On three-by-seven foot pieces of paper, students drew several outlines of different people in their groups, and then drew symbols that represented their background. The students were told to open up to their peers about what’s important to them, and not to hide their past.
Short- and long-term goals of the students were portrayed as well, in an effort to put the entire lives of students in an artistic display.
Sutankayo, community education co-ordinator at HIV Edmonton, said body mapping started in South Africa as an art project to help women to live with HIV-AIDS. It was used as a method to help those infected to open up to their communities and to live life without fear.
“There’s a lot of stigma to go along with this disease; people don’t like to disclose that they have it, and people don’t like to talk about it if their friends or family members have been affected. For many reasons, AIDS and HIV is related to death, drugs, sex; stuff that’s hard to talk about.”
Sutankayo thinks it’s important to get those in nursing to understand HIV-AIDS and to get rid of any stereotypes, especially as they will see patients infected with the virus on a regular basis.
“Often as healthcare providers, we feel that we’re entitled to know everything about our patients’ body, but we have to appreciate how much trust is required for a person to feel safe enough to disclose their history to us,” said Sutankayo. “What we’re here to do is to de-stigmatize HIV and people living with HIV.”
Two HIV Edmonton volunteers with HIV-AIDS were present to help the students with their body maps, as well as tell their personal stories of how the activity helped them in their struggles.
One student, Kaitlyn Gorman, didn’t know what to expect when she first went into the session, and said that it changed the way she looked at the ailment.
“I wasn’t really sure about HIV. I didn’t really know a lot about the disease, so I was kind of oblivious to it and ignorant to it,” she said. “Now I feel like I understand a lot more and have gained a lot of knowledge towards it, and I’m much more accepting, and have gotten rid of all those stereotypes that I did have before.”
Sutankayo also mentioned that body mapping could be used as a tool to help people with all sorts of issues or problems in life, not just chronic illnesses.
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