A day of good and bad

Published on 2011-05-23 by Annet Neijmeijer

Yvonne Bogaarts is member of the International Steering Committee and writing about her visit to Cameroon.

May 13.
A stange day today. The first part was awesome, with visits to the ACMS office, the Lanacombe laboratory, a delicious lunch at the Director’s house, followed by visits to a CBO, an association of women with HIV, and two hairdressers. Just great to see some wild idea I had at the end of 2006 actually having reached the women who need it. One of the hairdressers told us, that she really seizes every opportunity to talk about female condoms. When a friend would give a party, she would ask to put one minute for the ‘preventive feminin’ on the agenda. She would go to student boarding houses, to the quarters with the commercial sex workers, while others would work in markets and hospitals. Just amazing to see the enthusiasm with which people do this outreach work. The biggest problem as they see it is that women simply don’t know anything about the female condom. So you always have to start from scratch. But all also mentioned the first recurrent users: people coming to buy again. The sales at the pharmacies are disappointing as women don’t seem to come forward. Maybe this will change over time if we have reached a sufficient critical mass, and recurrent users start to buy at those sales points.
But as Valerie, my colleague from the International Steering Group was really ill, and needed to be evacuated to Nairobi, the day ended not in the festive mood expected. And although Valerie was in very good hands, it simply felt bad to leave a sick friend behind.

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ACMS

Advocacy

Cameroon

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2011-05-13

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Part of our new website is the revolutionary knowledge base. This is a repository of concepts related to the main theme of UAFC, the female condom. This repository is organized according to themes, geographic location and time. We invite you to start exploring our knowledge base.

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