Ahhh...orientation week has come and gone. As excited as we were for it to come we felt a sense of relief when it came to an end. I want to thank each person who passed by our booth, whether it was to say hello, play a game, register, buy a t-shirt, pick up a newsletter or inquire as to what the CSA is all about. I can safely say the interest that we saw at our booth made all out tireless efforts and preparation worth it. Congratulations to all the persons who won themselves prizes.
Our greatest accomplishment though was our communication experiment. Allow me to explain. We filled two bottles, one with sweets and the other with condoms, and persons, for the price of one dollar, had to guess the amount in each bottle in hopes of winning the contents. Everyone was comfortable with the sweets, but from the time they saw the condoms, some of the reactions we got were classic. We got stares, confused looking facial expressions, some people pointed and laughed, others just had to ask to ensure that it was actually condoms they were seeing. What was even funnier, was that many people avoided the bottle like it was a plague saying" what I guessin on dat for, I have no use for dat." Don't get me wrong, I know some persons adhere strictly to their beliefs, which i complpetely endorse, but do you think it was mere coincidence that 90% of the persons who visited our booth had such beliefs?
The most interesting part of the entire week was, considering that its a university campus, nobody came up to our booth and commended us for promoting safe sex. Granted that that was our intention, but it would have enriched out experiment as well as given us a new slant on a communication situation. Something that started as a simple game, left us defending our choice of the bottle's content. If our booth was the WYP booth, I'm sure persons would not have even looked twice, but communication, Lord only knows what they thought of us. What it proved to me however, was that the power of perception and context in communication how it can completely change the way something is viewed.
What was also interesting was that we found mainly that men were guessing on the bottle filled with condoms. It goes to show that safe sex even, though heavily promoted, is still taboo among forward thinkers such as us.
Communication is so dynamic, people do it even when they don't intend to, and as communicators in training we can't help ourselves we always observe and analyze. I want to thank everyone who gave us a stare or a wired look we appreciated it and I also want to thank and congratulate the winner of the condoms (he was quite happy with his prize).
Now we look ahead to the semester and to the year, I want to hear from you, because you can be sure to hear from me.
Jamila
