We picked up three loaves of bread on our way to Fountain of Hope to surprise the boys with breakfast J Vasco was really excited when we told him. We assumed our new roles of baby weighing and recording as soon as the clinic opened. Again, little black babies are way too adorable. All of them were growing and in the correct range for weight, so it was a successful morning. We are still working on finding sustainable sources of food for Fountain, so we stopped by Shoprite on our way to Munali to drop off a letter that we wrote for the manager, Mr. Bota. They cook tons of food in the pasta, pastry, and salad sections that they can’t reuse the next day. We’re hoping that they’ll agree to donate it to the boys at the end of each day.
Our only P.E. session of the day started super late (as usual). We also had no idea what the topic was (again, as usual), so we were feeling pretty frustrated. Sorry for the bitter tone, but the organization/communication issues here occasionally limit Sport In Action’s ability to reach the maximum number of students in an effective way. It turns out we were only meant to review topics since the quiz the students take at the end of the sessions is next week. We played a quick game to include something fun and then reviewed peer pressure, decision-making, problem solving and critical thinking, drugs and alcohol abuse, HIV/AIDS, empathy, and child rights. We had to laugh because one of the peer leaders was giving us a little bit of attitude because we didn’t know the U.N. “four pillars” of child rights. Finally, I just asked him what they were and he was like, “Oh…err…I can’t remember them right now”. (Yeah, that’s what I thought, bro).
Our HIV session at Tionge is rapidly becoming the highlight of our week. We think that about all of the students we taught last week came again and it seems like they really like it! We started off by reviewing HIV stigma and attitudes (last week’s topic) and then proceeded into the new topic, HIV biology. There were four subtopics: HIV vs. AIDS, vaccines, the immune system, and HIV replication. We explained that HIV is a virus that leads to AIDS, which is a condition. A lot of students are under the impression that once you become infected with HIV, you progress to having AIDS straight away, so we really like to make that distinction. We also told that about vaccines, how they work, and discussed challenges to the development of an HIV vaccine (the high mutation rate, ethical issues in testing, etc). A lot of them are familiar with the immune system (they often call it the defensive system), so we decided to go into more detail with them. We covered the basics of white blood cells and how HIV interacts with the immune system by infecting CD4 lymphocytes (we used the term T-cell to make it simpler). Finally, we used the immune system discussion to leeway into HIV replication. Many people here do not understand that the HIV test won’t detect the virus until a person’s viral load has reached a certain threshold. We wanted to make sure that if they learned nothing else in the lesson, they at least walked away understanding that they need to wait 6 weeks before getting tested if they have unprotected sex or share needles.
Before we took them outside for games, we sat down and went through every question they asked during our first session. It was really fun for the students and for Sarah and I. There were plenty of awkward questions about sex and dating that we felt a little silly answering. There were definitely moments when everyone in the room was laughing and cheering, but when we actually started to address the questions, all of the students were paying very close attention. It seems like they really appreciate being able to ask us anything and know that they’ll get honest and sincere answers. Especially because they don’t have sex education here and the culture is more conservative, it’s rare that students get a chance to be frank about their questions.
As the students were walking outside to play, one girl came up to me and was like, “When I get my period, my stomach hurts a lot and I think there’s something wrong with me. What’s that?” I don’t want to say it was “cute” because this girl was at least 16, but yeah it was kind of cute only because it’s so unlikely that there’s actually something wrong with her. I drew her a little picture of the female reproductive organs and explained all about cramps and how that’s totally normal. She looked so relieved and then asked Sarah and I if we would bring our cameras next time because the class wants to take pictures with us. We were so so happy!
The game for the day was a traditional game that we learned during the first couple of weeks here. It’s called Lion and Impala. The students hold hands and make a circle. One student, the impala, stands inside the circle and another, the lion, stands outside the circle. The students need to bunch together and hold tight to one another’s hand in order to keep the lion outside of the circle. If the lion manages to break into the circle, the students in the circle have to hurry to make room for the impala to escape. Then, they bunch up again to lock the lion inside. So to explain it more generally, the circle of students exists to either lock the lion outside and protect the impala inside, or allow the impala to exit the circle and then lock the lion inside. We adjusted the game by calling the impala the “healthy cell” and the lion the HIV virus. It connected really well to the lesson. We finished off the session by using the activity to remind the students that they are all capable of protecting their healthy cells from HIV simply by making the right decisions.
Sarah stayed at Munali to do some work with her basketball team while I went back to the office to work on answering the first round of Chipata’s anonymous questions and the second round of Tionge’s. Side note: As I was looking through Tionge’s next set of questions, it became clear that our honest and direct answers really emboldened the students to ask everything and anything. Try explaining to a group of 13-19 year old students what an orgasm is, why the penis gets so hard before sex, why people only have sex at night, or why people cry during sex sometimes. I’ll pay you $100 if you can get through all of that without cracking a smile. Some of them were interesting and important questions, including: can you love someone or marry someone who is HIV positive? Can traditional healers cure HIV? Or do HIV positive people need to eat a special diet?
Anyway, it was quite a long day for us and by dinnertime, I could be found curled into a ball on the couch watching Harry Potter while Sarah cooked. Sometimes, I would much rather get violently sick than just sit around suffering from stomach pains with no choice but to wait for them to go away. Bah. Sarah’s dinner was good though…pasta with yummy sauce, mince meat, and broccoli…mmm it cured me! We went to bed pretty early because Thursday is always the most tiring day of our week.
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