After the usually struggles with my university's administraion, I was able to get a table on campus during the week of World AIDS Day for a week-long event that I called "Candy Canes and Condoms." The catch: I had to distribute through another organization on campus (Texas Aggie Democrats) and I wasn't able to actually hand people the condoms, I could only have a bowl of them out for people to take. But I was still able to distribute over 250 condoms just that week!

I had some of my friends in Aggie Democrats help me tape mini candy canes (I bought them myself) to the outside of the condoms and we printed off a bunch of fliers and made some signs saying, "Free Candy Canes and Condoms" and "BTHO HIV/AIDS" (BTHO is one of our school slogans that means Beat The Hell Out of: insert various school opponent). Some people were more interested in the candy canes and put the condoms back in the bowl, but a surprising number of people wanted just the plain condoms. 

The GLBT organization on campus also had free rapid HIV testing on World AIDS Day and the day before in a building on campus, which was awesome because I was able to tell several people about it and at least 5 or 6 of them said they were heading over to get tested. There was another organization on campus that was handing out free red ribbons on World AIDS Day but a lot of people didn't want them for some reason. 

All in all it was a great week for distributing and I'm looking forward to more distributing next semester! BTHO HIV/AIDS! 

An on campus organization put on a fashion show for HIV/AIDS awareness that I distributed at today. There were a few other groups that had tables and were distributing condoms, but no other table had name brand condoms. I put them out in a sort of candy dish and I had refill it at least five times throughout the night. People were really excited that I had Trojan condoms. One girl said, "Finally someone brings condoms we can actually use." I talked with her a little bit about that and basically what she said is that there are plenty of cheap free condoms floating around, but none that anyone would actually care to use. Before tonight, I was under the impression that people weren't using condoms because they just weren't available anywhere. No I know that its the type of condom that counts. People would rather not use a condom than use one that they think might not do anything. Since Trojan is such a well known and respected brand name, I feel people will actually use the condoms that we're distributing instead of just keeping them in a drawer somewhere until they expire. It's one thing to have condoms, using them is a whole different ball game. So, when people want to use condoms they want Trojan, so how do we get more people to want to use condoms?