So the first day has started with all the big gorillas (the celebrities) and little ducks (the journalists) of the world smooshed into the Toronto Convention Center! It’s Day 1 of the conference, and I’m sitting in the media room, which has hundreds of journalists from all over the shop sitting at long tables, busily chipping away on their laptops whilst listening to the “Bill Squared” session—Bill Gates and Bill Clinton—on simulcast screens at the end of the room.
It gets you excited whenever you see another young person around: there are over a thousand of and we’re way more interestingly dressed than all the plain Joes in their suits. We’ve got Afrobeat tunes playing at our Youth Pavilion, which is inside the Global Village, this brilliant collection of tons of organizations doing anything and everything around ending HIV/AIDS.
There are heaps of fresh music and theatre performances. I’m going to one in a few minutes called “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” which combines reggaeton and hip hop with education messages. Last night, I met a couple of guys from Guatemala dressed in clown suits. They run all these performance workshops in high schools there getting the message out to youth.
Older people need to recognize that our generation are speaking an entirely different language! If we’re going to start reducing the number of new infections—right now, over half of them are amongst people under the age of 25—then they need to start speaking our tongue!
