World AIDS Day

posters put up at the high school

December 1 is World AIDS Day, or, if you’re a wordy francophone, Journée mondiale de lutte contre le Sida (Global day of the fight against AIDS). I had previously organized some small events for the day back in the States when I was a student organizer for the ONE Campaign at the University of Iowa, but it’s far easier to organize an event when you have access to things like photocopiers, movie projectors, and Facebook. Regardless, another teacher and I decided in late November that we would have a small informational session for the students. Then she called me Monday morning (about six hours before the session) to let me know that she was on a bus to the capital, so it would just be the students and me. Oh, dear.

I should have been more excited than nervous about the students taking charge. After all, one of the most lauded goals of Peace Corps is sustainability, or what some in development have called “working yourself out of a job.” Essentially, we should strive to make sure that in our absence, the education and improvement we have begun will continue without us. And although many people told me when I came to the Adamawa that the majority of people were too conservative to discuss HIV/AIDS, the younger generation is more open to discussion, and there is already a small but self-motivated group here in Nyambaka, the high school health club.

I can’t take any credit for the success of our “formation,” or session. It was towards the end of the school day, and I expected the students to head home as early as possible, as they usually do, but something prompted between 60 and 70 of them to stay. Maybe it was the charismatic Terminale (Senior) student Crépin, maybe the discipline master intimidated them into attending, or maybe they were just curious what the white teacher would say about a disease that some people here believe was created by whites to kill blacks.

Either way, the classroom was full when I walked in, and I was impressed with the amount of knowledge they already possessed about HIV. Sure, in theory they have a unit on HIV/AIDS every year in school, but the majority of teachers don’t complete their syllabi, partly because of absenteeism among both faculty and students. If I’m to be perfectly honest, I was envious of Crépin’s ability to maintain both attention and order in the room, since this is something I still struggle with, but I consoled myself with the thought that all of the students there had made an active choice to attend, unlike in English classes.

The ages of the students in the room varied from early teens to early twenties (many students are held back multiple times as they continue their high school education, including one 25-year-old Junior) so reactions to the material presented differed accordingly, even before the presentation began. When informational posters were dispersed among the classrooms, the students of sixième (sixth grade) refused to have one posted to their door because it mentioned condoms. Then there was a group of three young girls who sat in the front row but made disgusted faces whenever male genitalia were mentioned. The older students handled it with a little more decorum, and some young men were able to ask specific questions on the application of condoms.

Since the students were clearly already well acquainted with the facts around HIV—methods of transmission, methods of avoidance, etc.—I thought it might be useful to do a condom demonstration, but the discipline master immediately vetoed the idea. “If we give the students condoms, they’re going to use them,” he warned, and I thought to myself, Isn’t that the point?, but said nothing. Certain mentalities know no nationality: I remember hearing the same rhetoric from my middle school nurse.

I wish I were proud of my involvement in the day’s activities, but honestly, I played an almost negligible role: I just provided prizes (pens, not candy) during a sort of Jeopardy at the end of the session and corrected a few bits of misinformation. (Hopefully at least a few of the young women in attendance will remember the nassara frantically running to the front of the classroom to interrupt Crépin, shouting “IUDs do not protect against HIV! They prevent pregnancy, not STIs!”) I will say, however, that I think it was largely successful, and certainly informative for me, as I was able to see the students’ reactions and their preexisting knowledge of the disease. Here’s hoping that some of them will take the information to heart, and that next year’s event will be even more successful.