The Maintenance Shop will be the host of the ISU Global Health and AIDS Coalition’s “Telling Our Stories: ISU HIV/AIDS Monologues” event.

The event, to be hosted at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 4, will have several performers and is being funded by a Focus grant.

“We have five or six five-minute monologues, and then we have a couple of people doing poems. There’s two smaller poems and then one longer slam poem, and then the group does an opening and closing piece together,” said Lea Hoefer, a senior in global resource systems and the event coordinator.

Hoefer will be performing her piece based on her experience with students she worked with during a summer she spent in Tanzania.

“There’s a lot of really cool things that are happening in the world of medical research right now that makes me think that someday we won’t have to worry about HIV anymore,” Hoefer said.

Her performance piece, “The Science of It All,” deals with some of the misconceptions of the disease.

“I’m just really excited to perform [the monologues] for Iowa State,” Hoefer said. “These are actual stories from Iowa State students. All of the monologues are from people at Iowa State.”

The poems, however, were not written by ISU students, but were chosen by their respective performers for their sentimental meaning.

“Hearing these people that I’ve been working with tell their stories, it’s very emotional,” Hoefer said. “I’m hoping that will come across in the performance.”

Andrea Matthews, junior in global resource systems, will be another one of the students performing.

Her monologue is entitled, “That’s It,” and is about a Midwest, middle class white girl and what she can do to help in the AIDS movement, Matthews said.

“I am excited because I’ve never done anything like this before, so it’s a really new experience,” Matthews said.

Matthews said she hopes that people attending the event walk away with a new perspective.

“I really hope that students will come and be able to take something away from this performance,” Hoefer said.

She added that, often, people don’t think HIV and AIDS affect their community because the problem may not be as evident.

“We’re trying to show that it really matters to everybody and it affects everybody, and it’s important for people to be just aware of the issue if nothing else,” Hoefer said.

Hoefer said the club plans on presenting an event like this again in the future but with expanded performances.