Getting the (right) experience

World Vision was in town for their well-known international One Life exhibit at The Spring.

With all those good reviews of how inspiring and touching it was pouring in, I only had to try out the highly-acclaimed experience. Had to wait until the very last day before I could drag myself there though.

I was already impressed the moment I found the exhibit, with the deco and all. More so on the idea behind the whole thing, how they utilise headphones and mp3 players for narration, music and sound effects, how it gets you fully immersed into being inside the lives of HIV-positive individuals.

There was this turning point in the story where your character gets diagnosed as being HIV-positive during a visit to the clinic:

I felt a crunch in my heart when the nurse stamped me as HIV-positive.

What works so well about the One Life exhibit is that it takes you on a journey through the lives of real-life individuals from different locations who ended up being HIV-positive. So for 20 minutes, you’ll be ‘in their shoes’, going through exactly what these individuals experienced.

Thing is, I was trying pretty hard to get myself into the whole thing because I was walking the path of a girl in Cambodia. There was this part when she ended up in a brothel and when you’ll be standing in a rather dark, red-lit room, with lingerie all over the place, when the narrator said along the lines of, ‘You had sex with many men’

I shrugged.

It felt so, so wrong. I’m a straight guy man.

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Edit: Just realised I sounded as if I was picking on the whole thing. Don’t get me wrong, as I’ve said earlier, the One Life exhibit is really an amazing event. Enlightening, an eye-opener, it touches the soul and makes you think twice about how you live your only life. I really liked the part when you get the opportunity to write notes of encouragement that would be distributed to real-life HIV patients, I would very much love to be able to put a much-needed smile on their faces.