The day I stood before kings

...Continued from last week

Before I delve into how the D-Day went, let me just give you some facts about Geneva.

1. It is the third most expensive city in the world. So, it is definitely not the town to go shopping like you are on Oxford street.
2. Shops close by 6pm everyday, and don't open on Sundays. Apparently, they do this because it is a family-oriented town. I am still trying to correlate this with the fact that prostitution is legal, lol.

Anyway...\
I was presenting on Thursday, and it was just when I was about to sleep on Tuesday, that is got the idea to take my clothes off on stage. I wondered if I would be able to pull it off in such a short time, plus this was a very formal audience. I was happy about the fact that the taking cloths off concept came to me because

1. It distracted me from the fact that I was slower than usual
2. It distracted the listeners from the fact that I was fast for them (I hope so).
3. I just felt the extra efizzy would be good for my spoken word career, lol.
4. It was good for those people who did not speak English.

At the instant I was performing, the piece was being translated to different languages. So if you don't understand it, all you need us to fix your earphones, and switch to the channel of your language. I just felt they wouldn't enjoy the punch lines, alliterations, and word plays, and all those poetic jargon, after being translated. So the extra drama was a form of compensation for them.

These is the mic, earphones and channels they use to switch between languages. Nigeria, what's the way forward o?

As looked around the room that morning, many things dawned on me about the crowd

1. 99% of them were not the colour of my skin
2. They were far older than me, and the crowd I normally stood in front of
3. They did not belong to the class I belonged to, they were political.
they did not understand poetic jargon like alliterations, punchlines, imagery, word plays and those words
4. They did not speak the way I do
5. THEY WERE DIFFERENT

The thing is, it is very easy to woo a familiar crowd, tickle their ears and give them what they want to hear. But in this case, you cannot really tell what would impress this crowd, or what they want to hear, because they we well, different. So I prayed... I prayed hard. There was no need coming all the way from Nigeria, and crashing my career on a global scale. I could have easily done that in Nigeria.  God, please, help me.

And help me, God did. Let's just say I almost ran out of complimentary cards by the time I was done. This group of people that hardly clap were almost forced to stop clapping. The lady in charge who used me as experiment was impressed, and Michel Sidibe, the head of UNAIDS was tripped. What more could I ask for?

Empty seats waiting to be filled with listeners who
would later listen to me

My game face on. Lol

Michel Sidibe (the brain behind UNAID),
and a teenage girl born with HIV

Famzing with the people in high places

Beautiful Fatima. She was married off at the age of 14,
and infected by her husband

And the covering came off completely

The youth delegates who anchored the last session. If you take out the two people on the extreme left, the 4 people on the extreme right, and Michel Sidibe in the middle, 98% of the people in this picture are either HIV positive, openly gay, or both

All the performance pictures are courtesy of Olivier Borgognon of 320 studio, Geneva.

So who can tell how many pieces of clothings I had on the ground by the time I was done with the performance?

Out of all the youth delegates that were present, it was just me and one other girl that was quite neutral. It was either they were gay, HIV positive, or both. And let me quickly mention that I just found out that the new political word for gay men in MSM. Don't think too far, it means Men who have Sex with Men.

Ehm, Toinlicious and Sykik. That is my hair with 60% shrinkage o. i.e, you can only see 40% of the length.

If you want to know how the clothes began coming off, watch this video below. And please, pay attention to the message. Feedback highly needed. Thanks