The HOPE peer educators taught students different ways to have safe sex at their Safer Sex Olympics event Wednesday in the Smith Student Center Ballroom which involved teams competing at different stations with educational and entertaining activities.
Cara Burns, sophomore Public Health and French major and HOPE peer educator, said that the annual Safer Sex Olympics promotes safe sex education while also having fun.
Burns said she believes that it is good for students to learn about the supplies in this environment because it’s a non-threatening and interactive atmosphere where the students are not being judged.
The Olympics had 10 teams of five to seven people and were Halloween themed featuring fake hands, feet, and skulls to follow the organization’s idea.
There were seven different stations total and five involved condom challenges. These stations consisted of stretching a condom over a pool stick to see how far it was able to stretch, a relay race to see how fast teams could put condoms on fake hands and legs, fitting skeletons into a condom, a love dart game that had blown up condoms on the board, the proper steps to applying a condom, and inching a fake eyeball to the bottom of a condom.
Adagio Health is a health center that offers many services for children’s, women’s, and adult’s health and they came up with all of the game ideas for the night.
“I think we all need to learn about safe sex supplies because how to use them in general is confusing and why they’re needed is sometimes unknown,” Burns said.
HOPE peer educator and senior social work major, Jessica Tager, said that her favorite station was the pregnancy belly race which is a relay race where students put a book bag on their stomachs full of 25 pounds of sand to stimulate what it would feel like to be pregnant.
At this station, leaders had the participants perform basic daily tasks such as tying shoelaces and picking up regular items off the ground to give an insight of what happens when you do get pregnant.
“It’s an awareness that you should wear condoms and you should wear birth control and to always be protected because that way you don’t have to go through some of the struggles that you do playing the simulation game,” said junior safety management major, Taylor Hood.
Hood explains that it is very important to know about safe sex especially with our generation because she feels that everything now is very fast moving. All students should attend this event because it is great for awareness and fun at the same time, Hood said.
Hood hopes that students take away that the health center does a nice job of making sure that the students here on campus are safe and that there is always a safe place to go to if something happened and they need someone to talk to.
“I hope that they can take away a good understanding of what our goal is as HOPE peer educators and to have a good understanding of safe sex supplies in general,” Burns said.
