Edinburgh Student Stop AIDS Society release balloons for World AIDS Day

Balloons, ribbons and cakes for change

January 18, 2012
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dance4life peer educator Kate writes about how she marked World AIDS Day with the Student Stop AIDS Society. Scottish schools, if you’re interested in free skills4life sessions delivered by Kate, email rachel@restlessdevelopment.org…

As the Edinburgh students make their sleepy walk though the morning dawn to the looming library across the meadows, they are greeted, every year on the 1st of December, with a beautiful surprise: huge red ribbons wrapping the trees and hundreds of ribbons flapping from the railings in the wind. Its beauty holds against the breeze, capturing the minds of all those who pass, and regardless of what feeling it might bring up it sparks a moment of thought: who did this and why?

Every year World AIDS Day brings a flurry of excitement for the Edinburgh Student Stop AIDS Society, and this year was no exception. Despite the blistering cold we stood for hours behind a stall, spurred on by the friendly competition of the other societies. We sold cakes, gave out ribbons and began to fill balloons with helium. Then, clutching 90 filled red balloons, each representing 100,000 people without access to treatment, with a little relief we let them go, letting them take our message of hope for the future – may we let off less each year.

By the evening we had on our glad rags, cabaret style, for a CaberAIDS event jammed full of singing and dance, and to our joy, a venue filled with happy people. It was the perfect end to our busy World AIDS Day. As I walked home, untying the ribbons in the meadows as I went, I thought of those whose lives we touched with our efforts that day. And I thought of the man who cycled past me on the street that evening, who I had sold a cake to in the morning, and how the red ribbon pinned to his coat fluttered furiously in the wind, making me smile.

Throughout the year, when I am asked why there are ribbons in the trees, I get to answer that it was us; we did it to remember all the people who have died from HIV/AIDS, and we hung those ribbons in a single act of solidarity.

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