In this session, Doctor Fuller tells us about evaluating the Trusted Messenger Program in Zambia. A while back, we had a longer session in which Dr. Fuller told us about working with ministers in Zambia. The project had a strong emphasis on educating key members of the community about HIV and AIDS. The goal was to over come stigma and myths. And thus equip those trusted messengers, to educate and promote health in their community. Here she describes the results. You had a Fulbright grant that was directed I believe towards evaluating of this strategy. Is that right? >> Correct. In 2013, I spent ten months in Zambia doing what's called a validity study for the Trusted Messenger Intervention. And what it does is you can do a study and get certain results. Especially in the community, but one of the question becomes. Are the results due to what you do? Or are the results due to other things that are going on in the community? So in a validity study, we were able to take one area, one province, where all the people in our study were exposed to the same media. The same non-government agencies, NGOs were practicing, were in the community. And we were able to divide those clergy into three groups. One of them would get our intervention, at time A, and the other two would not. And we'd follow all three groups to see when the outcomes and I did not mention but we actually do this fairly rigorously. So that we know if it's making a difference. So we're measuring pre-workshop attitudes, pre-workshop knowledge, pre-workshop levels of stigma, whether they've been tested going into the room. And then we do that, say three months later or six months later to see if the clergy that goes with the workshop change in those outcomes. So in the validity study that I did as a Fulbright Scholar in Zambia, we were able to take three groups and follow their change in those outcomes based on when they got the content of our workshop. And the data which we're currently analyzing, but I already know what the trends are. The data showed that people change only after they get the workshop. So the testing level is going up in general in Zambia. But we get some 90 percent of our people are tested by the time they come back three to six months later from the workshop. And that's pretty phenomenal. So they're not only hearing and understanding, but that understanding leads to an action that has an impact on HIV. And the action we're looking for, the first action, the measurable action, is did they get tested? And then there's qualitative actions, now that you know, what do you do with this? Now that you understand that it's a fragile virus, it's not God's punishment for sexual sin. It's not a conspiracy from western countries to take over land. It's not witchcraft or any of those things, it's just a tiny virus that is trying to survive and you have the ability to keep it out of your body. Or if it's already in the body, we have antivirals now that can keep HIV infection from progressing to AIDS, the disease. So what are you gonna do with that? Right? And they do amazing things. They open schools for vulnerable children in the community who have lost their parents or whose parents are sick. They set up, as I mentioned community healthcare workers, who get trained by government programs. The programs were already there, it is just that they were not training church workers. Or they may open schools for the children as I mentioned. So they do things once they get it. They use their community resources, they take people to doctors. They recommend in premarital counseling that the couple both go to get HIV tested before they get married. So it's like turning on a switch. It's realy pretty amazing to watch.
