Bash Out HIV and AIDS!

Sometime in October, the delightful A., a Peace Corps volunteer for the Community Health program in my Namibia Group 41, invited me to join a collaboration of volunteers to host an HIV/AIDS awareness training in her home site, Khorixas.  I was delighted to accept.

She and her PCV friend T., also living in Khorixas but from Group 39, had christened their event, ‘Bash Out HIV/AIDS Halloweekend Camp.’  They designed a three-day training for teenagers to educate them about preventing and living with HIV and AIDS, and also about the American holiday Halloween.  (That’s just timing; HIV/AIDS and Halloween are not related, unless you want to claim they’re both scary.)  I wasn’t dead sure what my contribution would be – I came close to flunking the condom-putting-on pop quiz in PST – but I really wanted to be involved.  Southern Africa has the highest rates of HIV prevalence and incidence in the world, and apparently there remains significant stigma for people who contract it.  There’s little stigma around sexual activity; many people start fairly young and there’s a lot of out-of-wedlock baby-having, but catching a disease is considered at least embarrassing for many people, and outright shameful for some.  With about a 15% prevalence rate (over 30% in some regions), that seems hypocritical and worse.

They started the camp on Thursday, but I had an important meeting that morning in Usakos.  I’ll tell you about my travel experience in a future post.  Sufficient for this post is that I eventually arrived in Khorixas on Thursday evening, with a driver who knew where A.’s Ministry office is!  She was impressed; few people can find it, apparently.  I got there an hour or two before sunset, while the others were still out shopping for dinner, and sat on the curb theoretically writing.  (Theoretical writing is when you daydream with a notebook on your lap or someplace handy and a pen in your hand, or something similar.)

I travel to Khorixas, in the back of a bakkie part way, with a barefoot guy.

Then my friends showed up!  With frozen pizza!  That we cooked on a charcoal grill while the sun set behind the Ministry, and a car or two showed up with various livestock that got tied to trees, and a few people made preparations for poaching the hall A. and T. had reserved weeks in advance for their camp, and had been using for the previous two days.  Whoo, was A. ticked about that.  She is impressive when ticked, but you cannot fight this particular city hall very effectively, so she just made deeply and amusingly derisive comments to a decision-maker or two, and then ate pizza.  It was good.

T's Mum visited, and bought her a braii stand
and charcoal.  Yay, mothers!

The next day we convened for camp, with two girls and five boys eager to be back for day two.  We did some icebreaker/energizer games; the C.H. volunteers know about 20,000,000 of these things each.  One involved trying to tap the person next to you; if he or she got touched, he or she couldn’t use the affected limb or side for the rest of the game.  If not, you had to freeze in position while he or she tried to tap the next person in the circle.  Or something like that.  After another game or two, everyone sat at desks and A. reminded the learners that they were there to consider strategies they could use to protect themselves when they got involved in sexual or romantic relationships.  Then she introduced me, and asked me to tell the kids a bit about myself.

This is more or less what I said (slowly and distinctly; these kids had pretty good English, but few people’s is perfect here):  “Hello, everyone.  Thank you so much for letting me be a part of your camp.  I’m very happy to join you, especially because I can remember when AIDS first began to spread in the USA.  It was a very scary time, because no one knew why so many people were dying, or how the disease spread.  And it seemed that no one survived AIDS.  That was about thirty years ago.  Now we know so much more about it – how you catch it, how you can prevent it, and even how to live with it.  I’m so glad we can share this information with you, for you to share with your friends.  And I’m really looking forward to learning how you protect yourself in relationships.  I feel like very often, when I get involved in a romance, I wind up getting my heart broken.  So it will be good to learn how I can prevent that!”

A. took up my comments and asked the kids whether they had known before that AIDS was a problem in the USA, not just in Africa.  Some had; some hadn’t.  She also reminded them that relationships don’t just have physical ramifications.  The emotional component can be challenging, too.

They called this game 'Ninja.'

They moved into the learning exercises then.  One that really impressed me was asking the kids to write down what they hoped to be doing in five years, and again in ten, and in twenty.  They could read their ideas to the group, or keep them private.  One of the kids wanted to become a pharmacist; several planned to attend university; a few mentioned having children and spouses; one or two were hopeful of careers in I.T.  After they did that part, one of the facilitators handed out slips of paper with possible scenarios on them.  They asked each learner to read out the scenario on his or her slip, and then reflect on how his or her ability to achieve the ambitions they had just discussed would change if, for instance, “In 11^th grade, your friends start to pressure you to join them drinking at the bars several nights a week.  You resist for a while, but give in once or twice.  Eventually you decide that being with your friends is more fun than studying, and you start going out every night.  In 12^th grade, you fail all your exams but one.”  The scenarios were all very realistic ones, and the kids looked really thoughtful as they considered the possibility and the impact something like a sick aunt’s three kids coming to live with them might cause.  I really liked that one.

The next day was Saturday, and Halloween!  The team had spent some time explaining this peculiar, polyglot American tradition, and invited everyone to wear costumes on Saturday.  The PCVs were ready to accept the kids showing up without costumes, but my gosh!  They all wore costumes, and they were all GREAT.  Especially, I think, the toilet-paper mummy.

Several zombies.  I am one of two Jack-o-Lanterns; face design by C., the ghost.

We spent Saturday morning admiring each other’s outfits, doing more energizers, and doing negotiation role-plays.  They were amazing!  Boys and girls cheerfully pretended to be girls, boys or whatever the script demanded, and no one mocked anyone else, and they all came up with, variously, strong, clever, funny, deflective, smart replies to help them make and stand by good decisions about drinking, drugs, unprotected sex and other options that do not serve their long-term best interests.  I hope they weren’t just doing it to impress the grown-ups, and that they’ll stand by what they learned at camp.

Negotiating.

A. and T. distributed a brief quiz that would help them measure what success they had had in instilling correct information in these malleable young minds, and then we all crammed into a tiny office that, with the loss of the big hall to some political event, was the only place we could watch a Halloween movie.  First they distributed certificates to all the learners who had attended each day of camp – people are really big on certificates here – and Halloween candy.  Technological issues limited our movie choice, but we got Hotel Transylvania running and I think everyone enjoyed it.  It’s pretty sappy and predictable, but the jokes were good and the animation excellent and overall it was plenty fun.  At the end, we applauded, shook hands and hugged and wished everyone brilliant futures.  A. and T. would see these kids again (in fact, we met one of them at the market later that day), but the rest of us almost certainly won’t; not in two years of service in different towns many kilometres away.

That night, we celebrated G's birthday and then went out dancing, still in our costumes.  Khorixas is awesome.  That'll be my next post.

This is only part of what we taught them!