30 September 2015, Nairobi – The story of a Kenyan teenager who had AIDS, told in his own words shortly before he died, is one of the winning scripts in the AJAN competition Youth Movies for Life and Love.

The second edition of the competition has 30 winners out of 118 entries – all children and adolescents attending Jesuit and other Catholic schools and centres in 12 sub-Saharan countries, truly reflecting the AJAN rainbow of Africa and Madagascar.

The selected scripts in English and French will be made into mini-films that will serve as important tools for HIV prevention among youth, not least in the AHAPPY program of AJAN.

“I remember in a special way Ayub Meme from Cottolengo Centre, a home for AIDS-affected children and adolescents in Nairobi,” said Pauline Wanjau, AHAPPY program manager at AJAN.

“Ayub was 21 and had been taken in by the Cottolengo missionaries at the age of four after he lost lost both parents. He tried to give his story from the perspective of a young person living with HIV. It is my hope that his script will keep telling his story although he has left us, and that it may inspire other young people.”

The script-writing competition took place throughout 2014. The entries were judged by a jury of educators and youth animators who implement the AHAPPY in different African countries. It was a tight contest: each script had three readers and, to win, it needed to be informative, value-based and appealing to youth.

Below is a list of the competition winners: