SIDA Fighting to the Max

Hello hello out there.

December 1st is World AIDS Day, and this year my school took part in a pretty significant way. Two colleagues and I attended a Peace Corps HIV/AIDS and Life Skills workshop last spring in Ouahigouya, a city in the north of Burkina. There we learned all sorts of activities, games, and other teaching strategies to use with students at school. At the end of the workshop we came up with the goal to do a series of three HIV/AIDS sensibilizations with every class at our school. I must admit, at the time I thought we were aiming way too high to have any chance of success. But I was wrong.

Throughout the month of November, the three of us took one class per week and put on a crash course in HIV/AIDS. We talked about myths and realities surrounding the disease; modes of transmission of HIV; and prevention. The highlight of every class was without a doubt the condom demonstration. The Peace Corps lent us wooden penises, and at the end of each class we used them to demonstrate how to properly use a condom. As you can imagine, the mere sight of a wooden penis causes a class of 15 year olds to go completely nuts- screaming with laughter and practically rolling down the aisles. However, once they calmed down, they were dead silent, and the room usually took on an air of “Oh, so that’s how you do it. I never knew…”

This past Thursday (while all of you in the US were muching on turkey and watching the pathetic Lions), we gave a longer, more in depth presentation for the entire student body. We touched on subjects we had already addressed in the classrooms (you can never hear about condoms too many times, right?) but also talked about HIV history, stigmatisation, and the affect of HIV/AIDS on our village community. To celebrate after the presentation, the administration bought us lunch- a huge pile of goat meat. Nick, you’re going to feel right at home here, uh, sort of.

All in all I think our sensibilisations went really well. Though we got a lot of questions from students that seemed completely irrelevant to their lives (Can monkies get HIV? What about dogs?), we also got to address a lot of practical questions such as: Can I use two condoms? (No!) Can I use the same condom twice? (No, again!) Can you get HIV by eating with someone? (Third no in a row.) And since it was probably the only time most of the students have ever talked about sex with grownups, I think it was very beneficial for them. If nothing else it provided them with ample opportunity for snickering at wooden penises.