BY KEITH LACEY
Brian Slegers, a youth outreach worker with ACCESS AIDS, will be featured in a documentary being aired on Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) Saturday at 5 pm.
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SLEGERS |
Slegers attended a seminar in Labrador in October where he met a film crew from APTN (Cable Channel 5). The name of the documentary is Not So Wealthy, Not so Healthy.
Slegers has a college diploma as a youth services worker and is in his final year in native human resources at Laurentian University.
?We spent six days in Labrador discussing the issues of HIV and AIDS and how to implement strategies to prevent the spread of the virus among young people in these small remote communities.
?Of the many small towns I visited, HIV and AIDS had not yet become an overwhelming problem, but we did learn about one young male, age 18, who had infected 30 young girls in one community.
There isn?t a lot for young people to d in these communities, so they start engaging in sexual activity at a very young age and this tends to lead to social and health-care problems, he said.
One serious problem many might not realize is just how difficult it is for young people in these communities to get access to or be willing to use condoms, said Slegers.
The young people who are sexually active often don?t want to visit the only store in town to purchase condoms out of embarrassment. Some stores don?t carry enough condoms, said Slegers.
?It might not seem like a serious issue, but it is, especially in these isolated communities,? he said. A second airing of the documentary will be shown Monday at midnight on APTN.