Today we woke up early to go to Fountain of Hope to help the nurse at the clinic. Every Wednesday, mothers in the community come to get their babies weighed and vaccinated. They each have their own little pamphlet where the weight and vaccination schedule of their baby is recorded. We are such suckers for little black babies! They are so precious!
Next time, we’ll have to take a picture of the scale they use to weigh all of them. It’s basically just a denim bag hanging from a scale with two holes cut in the bottom for their legs. We spent most of the time weighing them, recording all the information, and collecting the money that the clinic charges for the service (1,500 kwacha, which is about 30 cents).
The nurse was administering polio immunizations. Since we’re not nurses, we couldn’t do it ourselves but she let me watch (Sarah’s not a needle person, so she steered clear). UNICEF donates all the syringes and vaccine bottles. The nurse vaccinated about 12 babies while we were there. She said they also get measles at 9 months, and I saw on the vaccination schedules that they also receive Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, and DPT (which I think is diptheria, pertussis, also known as whooping cough, and typhoid). We had to get all of those, or boosters, before we came here.
A boy stopped in to see the nurse while we were there because he literally had a hole in his toe. While living on the streets, he stepped on something that cut his toe open and it got dirty and infected. Now, it’s just a gaping hole and I’m not totally sure what the nurse is going to do about it. Ivy told us that she looked at it when she was last at Fountain and it’s in really bad shape. When boys leave the streets to come live at the orphanage, the caretaker tries to prioritize giving them all shoes.
After spending a couple of hours at Fountain, we took the bus to Munali. We had one p.e. session at Tunduya at noon. The topic was HIV/AIDS. We used a book called Tackle Africa that two other volunteers, Jordan and Laura, brought with them. It’s full of games that use soccer drills and games to teach HIV information. The game we used is a game of tag, only you’re safe from being tagged if you’re dribbling a soccer ball when the tagger catches you. It represents using a condom to protect your self from HIV. We didn’t have enough soccer balls, so we used cones instead. The kids thought it was really funny when we handed out six or seven of them and said they represented condoms. One half of the group played that game, while the other half played a game designed to teach about drug abuse. Then the groups switched and everyone did a cool stigma activity at the end. You basically line the students up and choose one volunteer to try and guess which students are holding rocks in their hands (all the students put their hands behind their backs, so they all look the same and it’s impossible to tell). We use that activity to remind the students that you can’t tell if someone has HIV just by looking at them. Just because someone is rich or stylish or smart doesn’t mean they can’t get infected. A lot of students think that having HIV makes you look markedly different, which isn’t true, so it’s a good activity for them.
After the session, Sarah and I walked down the road to the Tionge school, where our first HIV education session was being held at 2 p.m. We were so nervous and excited! We had about 45 students ranging in age from 13 to 19, boys and girls. We started by giving them their pre-program questionnaire. We explained that their names wouldn’t be associated with their responses and to be as honest as possible. Aside from having to explain what certain words meant (concurrent, progress, susceptible), that went really well.
Once all the tests had been collected, we did our first real lesson! The topic was HIV Attitudes and Stigma. First, I asked them what emotions came to mind when they thought about HIV and some of the responses were really intense. They included: kill myself, feeling all alone, feeling like all eyes are on you, dying, feeling as if the world has turned against you. The group was really brave about giving honest feedback. We used that information to leeway into how such negative feelings contribute to the stigma surrounding the disease and how that might impede the efforts to fight it (i.e. people are afraid to get tested or go in for treatment because they don’t want to be seen entering an HIV clinic. Therefore, more people than necessary are spreading HIV unknowingly or dying of AIDS when they could’ve lived for several more years).
Sarah did the second half and did a really good job of leading the discussion. She asked them to brainstorm how the stigma surrounding HIV makes it even more devastating for those who are HIV positive. They came up with a lot of good responses, including feeling afraid, laughed at, talked about, isolated, and unable to get a job, make friends, or have a fair relationship with teachers at school.
Before the lesson, we gave them all pieces of paper and pens and encouraged them to write down any questions that they wanted to ask but were too scared or embarrassed to say in front of an entire class (idea credit to Miss Claire Gilhuly, who tested that method when she taught in Africa and had great success). We collected the pieces of paper as they exited the classroom to play games outside, and we were surprised to see that every single student submitted at least one or two questions.
Outside, we played the game we used during p.e. at Tunduya (where they stand in a line and someone guesses where the rock is). We also played a game called pivot tag, which Sarah used while coaching at basketball camps in the states. The game starts out with only one or two taggers, but everyone who is tagged also becomes a tagger. Eventually, it gets impossible to cross the tag zone without being caught. It’s useful for teaching students how quickly HIV replicates once inside your body and highlighting how HIV spreads exponentially through a community. One HIV positive person becomes 5, becomes 12, becomes 24, etc. Overall, we were really happy when we dismissed them at the end of the day. We left the site in really good spirits and excited to go through all of the data.
One of our volunteer friends, Katie, was celebrating her 21st birthday. We met her and her housemates at a burger place and then went back to their house to have cake. Not going to lie, it was really nice to have something sweet and yummy for dessert.
By the time we got back to our house, we just had enough energy to go over all of the anonymous questions submitted by the students at Tionge. We sat at the kitchen table with Ivy and read through every single one. They definitely ranged in content. Here are some examples:
-I keep having bad thoughts about girls in class i.e. imagining having sex with them. How do I stop myself from having these thoughts?
-I want to date, how do I do it?
-It is bad to date a classmate?
-Can you get HIV from kissing? (that one was common)
-Can you get HIV if you’re circumcised?
-What does it feel like to have sex?
-Does a boy’s sperm get rotten if he doesn’t have sex by the time he’s 18?
-If a boy touches a girl’s breasts, do they get bigger?
-Why can boys have more than one girlfriend, but girls can’t? If boys can do it, I want to, too. How do I do it?
-Am HIV. Help.
Obviously, it’s difficult not to laugh at some of them, but we’re going to do our best to give the most appropriate and helpful answers we can. For a group of students who never had puberty or sex ed classes, it’s not a surprise that they ask some of these questions (i.e. the one about men’s sperm getting rotten…who’s teaching them that? Yikes). We think we’re going to put together a sheet for each student to take home that has each question paired with an answer. We’re also thinking of putting together a list of HIV clinics and counseling centers that students can utilize if they ever need to (mostly in response to the slip that only had “Am HIV. Help” written it on. Oh my gosh). We’re going to go through all of the questionnaires and compile the data this weekend, so stay tuned!
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