Twinning Program
The “Twinning Program” was a grassroots exchange program that paired up 14 Kenyan community-based health-care workers with US grassroots counterparts in 2001. This program was funded by the NIH Office of AIDS Research in colla-boration with the National Minority AIDS COUNCIL (NMAC) to allow represent-atives of both countries to exchange ideas and experiences in managing HIV/AIDS issues in their communities.
Twinning partners meeting at the G.R.A.C.E. officeEighty percent of the twins have managed to sustain the partnerships they forged during the visits. Some American twins have offered Kenyan twins financial and material support to implement various aspects of the program. Several have received large numbers of IEC materials (booklets and videotapes) from their US counterparts.
One of the participants, Mary Makokha of the Rural Education and Empowerment Program in Butula, Kenya writes of her experience in this program:
"Participants of the Twinning Program will never be the same again! The program gave us this feeling of ‘Yes! We are on the right track.’ This improved our confidence and back home we were no longer seen as people just talking; we became community experts on issues relating to AIDS. People wanted to know what we had learnt in America and whether we saw anyone with AIDS in America. Our messages and warnings about AIDS were taken seriously. In every way, we came back better people than we went.”