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For those who are visiting Vancouver to catch some Olympic action – there is a group of volunteers who have taken to the streets to make sure visitors don’t catch anything else. The World’s Andrea Crossan has more. Download MP3 (photo: Andrea Crossan)

• Safe Games 2010
• See photos of Captain Condom

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MARCO WERMAN:  The many visitors in Vancouver are there to catch some Olympic action but a group of volunteers has taken to the streets to make sure the fans don’t catch anything else.  The World’s Andrea Crossan explains.

ANDREA CROSSAN:  About half a million visitors are here for the Olympic Games.  Crowds fill downtown Vancouver everyday.

SPEAKER:  What is this?  What is this?

TORI TALAVARA:  Free condoms and information.

SPEAKER:  Perfect, thank you.

CROSSAN:  Tori Talavara roller-skates through the teaming masses.  She is dressed as a blue condom package.  She is Captain Condom.

TALAVARA:  Here I am, dressed like a condom.  On roller skates.

CROSSAN:  Talavara or Captain Condom is from Los Angeles.  She’s in Vancouver to help out with the public health project, Safe Games 2010.  The caped, masked Talavara offers passersby bags filled with condoms, lubricant and informational material.

TALAVARA:  It really is a great idea if you think about the numbers of people that descend upon a city when the Olympics come and everybody’s out there you know, celebrating, having a good time and so we just want to make sure that everyone’s doing it as safely as possible.

CROSSAN:  Safe Games began 8 years ago at the Salt Lake City Olympics.  Luciano Colonna heads the project.

LUCIANO COLONNA:  The main goal is to educate people who are going to be celebrating around the Olympics and harm reduction, safer sex, safer drug and alcohol use, basically to respect everyone also with dignity.

CROSSAN:  Safe Games is a partnership with 40 non-profit groups.  They provide information on everything from where to get help for alcoholism, to where to get a clean needle.  The campaign has several superheroes in addition to Captain Condom.  They include Methadone Man, Buprenorphine Babe, Epidemiology Guy, Bi-Curious and the Caped and Always Protected Crusader.  Colonna says that the 120 volunteers of Safe Games do the lion’s share of the work.

COLONNA:  Basically our volunteers walk up and down the streets or they set up shop somewhere so to speak and they hand out condoms, they hand out lubricant, they hand out informational materials, they hand out DVD’s and they also hand out glow sticks which are a great way of engaging young people without having to hand them condoms or some of the more inappropriate material.  So we have something for everybody.

CROSSAN:  Safe Games hasn’t always received an Olympic welcome.  Some conservative religious organizations staged protests at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games and Colonna recalls his efforts at the Beijing Games in 2008.

COLONNA:  I did go to China and met with the Chinese government about bringing Safe Games there.  They invited me there and we had some pretty long discussions about it but at the end, they decided that they were not going to focus on HIV and AIDS prevention.

CROSSAN:  But Vancouver has embraced Safe Games.  The city provides most of the money to run the project.  The fact is that Vancouver has a major public health problem.  HIV infection rates are six times the national average.  Captain Condom has almost finished her shift.  She has distributed just about all of her Safe Games bags.

TALAVARA:  You get a lot of groups of folks traveling in packs and it’s funny because you’ll offer you know, a bag to them you know that’s like full of condoms and some other info and stuff and a lot of times they’ll all say no and then as soon as one person from the group takes it, everybody else is like okay, okay, okay, I’ll take one, too.  Because they really need it and they really want it.

CROSSAN:  The organizers of Safe Games are already looking ahead to the 2012 Olympics.  Expect to see caped crusaders in London taking to the streets to keep us mere mortals safe from danger.  For The World, I’m Andrea Crossan in Vancouver.

WERMAN:  And you can see photos of superhero Tori Talavara as Captain Condom at TheWorld.org.

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