Community life competence has made my work easy as a counselor

[EUNICE MUSUBIKA]

I work as a counselor on different projects related to HIV, reproductive health, drugs and substance abuse with the young persons and key populations.

Before I started using SALT our approach was to give solutions to these people we used to work with, counsel them how to live their life better. And give them guidelines how to do everything. This was not very effective in helping them to change their behavior because the solutions were ours and which they could not apply in their life. For eg key populations who were on Anti retroviral therapy for HIV, had a challenge with nutrition. When we asked them to have nutritious diet they said that they could not afford it because of financial constraints. This affected intake of medicine as some medicines had restrictions on the kind of food they were to consume.

 But after learning about community life competence and SALT, I realized that these people have their own strength and have been able all along to live their own lives without our guidance. So I decided to meet them as a group and discuss with them what they think is best for them, what they think they can do and ask them the resources they have which they can use to improve their nutrition and eventually drug adherence. So, most of them realized that they have small space where they could grow vegetables and other food stuff that grow easily.  We have many communities like in Katabi, which is growing mushrooms and is supplementing their nutrition.  

[EUNICE MUSUBIKA]

thanks Maya Karla and Rituu B Nanda. for sharing. that's very encouraging.

[Rituu B. Nanda]

Response from facebook of another CLC facilitator who is also a counselor. She is Maya from India

Maya Kalra Thanks Rituu...........yes, in counselling it is so important to look at strengths of people and feed it back to them

[EUNICE MUSUBIKA]

Thanks Autry Haynes. am always glad to share.

[Autry Haynes]

Very very inspiring thanks I will share and use this experience (^_^)