Word: menyoli
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This year's favorite in the unofficial popularity contest is Isaac Menyoli. The 29-year-old cross-country skier from Buea in snowless Cameroon - his country's first-ever Winter Olympian - wants the ballyhoo that comes with being bad. But unlike the crowd-pleasing losers of Games past, he doesn't want all the attention. He actually has something other than himself to promote: AIDS education...
...desire to do something seized Menyoli in 2000, when he traveled back to Cameroon from Wisconsin, where he has been studying architecture and working since 1994. Some aid workers had gone into Cameroon to teach sex education and AIDS prevention. But most locals wouldn't listen to the foreigners. Many said that HIV was a lie or a conspiracy. Yet some of Menyoli's friends had died and "I suspect AIDS was the case," he says. "But people said, 'No, it was witchcraft or voodoo...