Check out the latest blog from the star of Shuga, Lupita Nyong’o aka Ayira. In this post, Lupita talks about the sexual energy that is flowing through the conference, meeting Chairman and Chief Executive of MTV Networks International, Bill Roedy and signing for rights…

I arrived at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna with the intention to take it all in and push myself to do new things.

The conference building is ENORMOUS! There are about 30,000 organisations here and, by the end of the day I hadn’t visited even half of the booths. It’s great to know that so many people are involved in dealing with this disease but sad thinking how much money gets poured into bringing everyone together to talk about it…

In the Staying Alive booth we have a humongous computer screen where participants can do digital graffiti with an actual spray can that paints the wall virtually. People come up to the wall and write all sorts of AIDS related slogans, which automatically get sent to a Flickr page. How innovative is that!! Our booth is always busy with people dying for 5 minutes of graffiti-fame.

We started off the day with an interview for the conference magazine. Tej, an American journalist, grilled us in the nicest way possible about our experiences shooting Shuga and our roles we play as ambassadors for HIV/AIDS awareness. The interview went swimmingly until the final question which left both Nick and I thinking: If we could give one message to young people, what would it be? I particularly disliked this question because I tend to be long-winded, so summarizing is a constant challenge of mine. Shuga says so much, it’s hard to pick just one message that holds all the other messages inside it.

In the afternoon came the first screening of Shuga Episode 1, followed by a short Q & A session. There was a great turnout – no seat was empty. During the session, a participant asked, what do you say to people that think that Shuga is exposing less experienced young people to risky behaviour that they otherwise would not be aware of? And then he added, “Like your character Ayira, it can make sheltered women turn to prostitution, for example,” or something to that effect. My first reaction was “Wow, slow down, who said Ayira was a prostitute!”, It’s hard for me sometimes not to get offended when someone judges a character I play, because I’ve spent so much time getting to understand where that character is coming from… I politely answered his question, saying that of course there’s a risk when you put information out there that someone will abuse, distort or misinterpret it, but that shouldn’t stop us from still putting it out there, because ignorance will do more harm than knowledge will. At least knowledge gives us options to choose from, right?

After the screening I had the pleasure of meeting Bill Roedy, the CEO of MTV Networks. What a charming man! You would never know he was the man on top of over 100 MTV Channels around the world! We chatted for a bit about life, SHUGA and other mysteries. It’s rare and beautiful when you meet someone of such great influence who makes you feel like it is their honour to meet you.

We hung out at our booth, handing out “I signed for rights” stickers, on which people write out why rights matter to them and then these stickers get stuck on a banner. All the stickers then get put in a raffle to win an iPod at the end of the day. These are the interactive activities that have made our booth so popular.

At the end of the busy day, we attended a funders’ reception at a nearby hotel. The energy was high. Bill Gates and Annie Lennox graced the occasion. I definitely felt like a fish out of water among all the who’s who of the AIDS world until, I ran into my mother’s best friend, Beth Mbaka! She works in London these days for a cool organization called Comic Relief, who use celebrities to create HIV/AIDS awareness. She was so surprised to see me so out of context. My evening turned for the better.

It’s interesting and curious what sexual energy I got from the conference today. Sex is obviously the most popular subject of discussion, so though we’re here to talk about a deadly sexually transmitted disease, there’s sex talk everywhere and free condoms. You can’t help but think about if and how many people hook up at these kinds of conferences… The conference pushes the message of safe sex through other kinds of sexual activities that do not involve intercourse. But what I like is that things are bold and naked here – people are speaking straight, so if there is hooking up going on, I’m sure it’s uber-safe!