Kenya Prison Days
Day 1. The welfare officer from the government prison in my town wanted my organization to train their staff and inmates on HIV/AIDS. They requested that we come twice a month because of the high inmate turnover. I’ve seen those prisoners before; they wear black and white striped uniforms, trudge around with their hands and feet chained together and always have a small crew of armed guards following them. They embody every stereotype of prison inmates there is, and I didn’t really feel like going there twice a month to entertain each new batch of dirt-encrusted petty criminals.
Instead, I agreed to do a training of trainers (TOT), where I would train a few staff members to become HIV/AIDS educators for the prison community. The prison houses over 300 prisoners at any one time, and has a staff of 170. The staff lives on the prison compound with their families, so the “honest” portion of the prison community numbers around 500 to 600. It seemed like a population that I could talk to without cringing and getting heebie-jeebies.
Interestingly enough, the prison dispensary has a VCT for staff members only. I guess the government of Kenya thinks VCT services for prison staff is a noble investment, but as of now they’ve left prisoners to fend for themselves as far as VCT services go.
I prepared a six-hour workshop for four staff members, that has turned out to be a three-day workshop for nine staff members, and multiple requests for additional workshops. It has been quite a sleeper success due to a number of fortuitous circumstances that were originally kind of annoying.
The first annoying circumstance was that I suddenly felt lazy and overwhelmed at the last minute. I really wanted to do a TOT, rather than the standard biology lesson on HIV/AIDS and the “ABCs: Abstain-Be Faithful-Use a Condom” sermon that puts everyone to sleep. But I had never actually done a TOT before, so three days before the workshop I still had nothing prepared, and was feeling like I had been too ambitious. How was I supposed to come up with six hours of material on how to educate other people on HIV/AIDS? I needed to focus on teaching these folks how to teach other people, but I don’t even know how to teach, much less how to teach about teaching.
I decided that instead of thinking about it, I would go biking with Adrienne. When I got to her house, she had a pile of notes on TOT from a Health Education manual put out by Peace Corps volunteers of years past. It was perfect. And I realized that no PCV should really ever have to create her own lesson plans from scratch, because almost everything has been done before. Sometimes when you’re all alone in the bush, it’s easy to forget simple PCV truths like this.
Wednesday morning, the day of the workshop, I went to the office to meet my co-worker who was supposed to teach the workshop with me. We had agreed to start the workshop at 9am (the unspoken rule being that we were on Kenyan time). At 9:30 she still hadn’t arrived. I asked my supervisor if he had seen her yet. “She will come,” he said, Kenyanly.
At 11:30 she still hadn’t arrived. My supervisor chose that moment to finally tell me, “I talked to her yesterday and we agreed that you will teach the workshop with Godi.”
Godi and I had both been in the office all morning. Why were we both being told NOW that there had been a change of plan that was decided yesterday, without consulting either of us? Why weren’t we told when we first arrived in the morning, so that we could be on our way? Why was something that seemed so obvious and logical not done in an obvious and logical way?
I set off to the prison with Godi, who is a trained VCT counselor with no experience teaching in the community. I briefed him on the teaching outline I had put together, and crossed my fingers. By the time we arrived, everyone had gone to lunch. By the time we started the workshop, the sun was starting to drop in the sky.
One of the biggest frustrations for PCVs who teach about AIDS is that we are often told not to talk about condoms. Instead, a lot of schools and churches insist that the only behavior-change we should be teaching is abstinence. After having so many of my three-hour presentations instantly invalidated by teachers and principals who stand up after my lesson and say to a roomful of high school boys, “You students, you do not need condoms, because you are not having sex. I don’t want to see you having any condoms, they are not for you,” my definition of behavior change had become “tell people ALL their options, so they can make an informed decision.” In other words, I will always teach about the C of the ABCs of preventing HIV transmission: condoms.
But the focus of the TOT workshop I put together was on the one behavior change that I usually forget about in my eagerness to promote condoms, but that I think is far more important than using condoms. It’s called talking.
It seems so simple, but HIV is a taboo topic in Kenya because sex is a taboo topic. So I opened the workshop by asking everyone to write down every word they could think of related to sex and HIV/AIDS that made them uncomfortable. There was a chorus of giggles, and sporadic embarrassed snickering throughout the activity, but in the end we were able to write a long list on the board.
Then I asked the group to name people who they would feel comfortable saying these words to, and whom they wouldn’t. The answers weren’t surprising: you can use words like penis and vagina with agemates and sexual partners, but not with parents, polite company of the opposite sex, pastors or your children. Given these answers, I was impressed that this group of men and women, who were all workmates, and considerably different in age and job rank, were beginning to open up and speak freely, especially the women. A rare, healthy group dynamic was beginning to form, because I had forced people to say “penis” and “vagina” in their mother tongue.
Then I asked the group if they thought it was important to talk to any of the people they felt uncomfortable talking to about sex. Suddenly everyone was talking about their kids.
“I don’t know if my 9-year-old boy has had sex yet. But I don’t want to talk to him about it because then he’ll go and have sex.”
“There’s so much sex on TV that sometimes I have to turn it off when I see my kid watching. But that just makes him want to watch more, because I don’t know how to tell him that sex is bad and that he’s not supposed to watch it.”
Sometimes it got kind of weird.
“There is a problem if I try to tell my son and daughter about sex. If I strip them both naked and say, you have one of these, and she has one of these, and if you put this into that, then it feels really good, then how do I then go back and tell them, but you must go outside to find a partner, you cannot be partners with each other?”
Um, yeah.
As the group shared their concerns, it was hard for me not to blurt out my personal opinions about what they were saying. But I knew that anything I said would be interpreted as a Western mind telling Africans to change their ways without understanding why Africans are they way they are.
Instead, I let Godi talk. And he shined. All his experience counseling VCT clients came through.
“It’s important to create an atmosphere of openness with your children, so they’ll feel like they can talk to you about things.”
“If you act like sex is a shameful thing, like flipping off the TV with no further explanation, your kids will think it’s a shameful thing that shouldn’t be talked about.”
“You need to empower your kids with all the information about sex, so they can make choices for themselves.”
Exactly what I would have said. The group was really receptive, but I think if I had said the same thing, they might not have accepted it as readily as they did when it came from Godi, a fellow Kenyan.
The next day of the workshop, half the group reported that they had talked to their partners and kids about HIV with great success, and one woman’s husband even wanted to visit a VCT.
[Next installment: Day 2.]
Instead, I agreed to do a training of trainers (TOT), where I would train a few staff members to become HIV/AIDS educators for the prison community. The prison houses over 300 prisoners at any one time, and has a staff of 170. The staff lives on the prison compound with their families, so the “honest” portion of the prison community numbers around 500 to 600. It seemed like a population that I could talk to without cringing and getting heebie-jeebies.
Interestingly enough, the prison dispensary has a VCT for staff members only. I guess the government of Kenya thinks VCT services for prison staff is a noble investment, but as of now they’ve left prisoners to fend for themselves as far as VCT services go.
I prepared a six-hour workshop for four staff members, that has turned out to be a three-day workshop for nine staff members, and multiple requests for additional workshops. It has been quite a sleeper success due to a number of fortuitous circumstances that were originally kind of annoying.
The first annoying circumstance was that I suddenly felt lazy and overwhelmed at the last minute. I really wanted to do a TOT, rather than the standard biology lesson on HIV/AIDS and the “ABCs: Abstain-Be Faithful-Use a Condom” sermon that puts everyone to sleep. But I had never actually done a TOT before, so three days before the workshop I still had nothing prepared, and was feeling like I had been too ambitious. How was I supposed to come up with six hours of material on how to educate other people on HIV/AIDS? I needed to focus on teaching these folks how to teach other people, but I don’t even know how to teach, much less how to teach about teaching.
I decided that instead of thinking about it, I would go biking with Adrienne. When I got to her house, she had a pile of notes on TOT from a Health Education manual put out by Peace Corps volunteers of years past. It was perfect. And I realized that no PCV should really ever have to create her own lesson plans from scratch, because almost everything has been done before. Sometimes when you’re all alone in the bush, it’s easy to forget simple PCV truths like this.
Wednesday morning, the day of the workshop, I went to the office to meet my co-worker who was supposed to teach the workshop with me. We had agreed to start the workshop at 9am (the unspoken rule being that we were on Kenyan time). At 9:30 she still hadn’t arrived. I asked my supervisor if he had seen her yet. “She will come,” he said, Kenyanly.
At 11:30 she still hadn’t arrived. My supervisor chose that moment to finally tell me, “I talked to her yesterday and we agreed that you will teach the workshop with Godi.”
Godi and I had both been in the office all morning. Why were we both being told NOW that there had been a change of plan that was decided yesterday, without consulting either of us? Why weren’t we told when we first arrived in the morning, so that we could be on our way? Why was something that seemed so obvious and logical not done in an obvious and logical way?
I set off to the prison with Godi, who is a trained VCT counselor with no experience teaching in the community. I briefed him on the teaching outline I had put together, and crossed my fingers. By the time we arrived, everyone had gone to lunch. By the time we started the workshop, the sun was starting to drop in the sky.
One of the biggest frustrations for PCVs who teach about AIDS is that we are often told not to talk about condoms. Instead, a lot of schools and churches insist that the only behavior-change we should be teaching is abstinence. After having so many of my three-hour presentations instantly invalidated by teachers and principals who stand up after my lesson and say to a roomful of high school boys, “You students, you do not need condoms, because you are not having sex. I don’t want to see you having any condoms, they are not for you,” my definition of behavior change had become “tell people ALL their options, so they can make an informed decision.” In other words, I will always teach about the C of the ABCs of preventing HIV transmission: condoms.
But the focus of the TOT workshop I put together was on the one behavior change that I usually forget about in my eagerness to promote condoms, but that I think is far more important than using condoms. It’s called talking.
It seems so simple, but HIV is a taboo topic in Kenya because sex is a taboo topic. So I opened the workshop by asking everyone to write down every word they could think of related to sex and HIV/AIDS that made them uncomfortable. There was a chorus of giggles, and sporadic embarrassed snickering throughout the activity, but in the end we were able to write a long list on the board.
Then I asked the group to name people who they would feel comfortable saying these words to, and whom they wouldn’t. The answers weren’t surprising: you can use words like penis and vagina with agemates and sexual partners, but not with parents, polite company of the opposite sex, pastors or your children. Given these answers, I was impressed that this group of men and women, who were all workmates, and considerably different in age and job rank, were beginning to open up and speak freely, especially the women. A rare, healthy group dynamic was beginning to form, because I had forced people to say “penis” and “vagina” in their mother tongue.
Then I asked the group if they thought it was important to talk to any of the people they felt uncomfortable talking to about sex. Suddenly everyone was talking about their kids.
“I don’t know if my 9-year-old boy has had sex yet. But I don’t want to talk to him about it because then he’ll go and have sex.”
“There’s so much sex on TV that sometimes I have to turn it off when I see my kid watching. But that just makes him want to watch more, because I don’t know how to tell him that sex is bad and that he’s not supposed to watch it.”
Sometimes it got kind of weird.
“There is a problem if I try to tell my son and daughter about sex. If I strip them both naked and say, you have one of these, and she has one of these, and if you put this into that, then it feels really good, then how do I then go back and tell them, but you must go outside to find a partner, you cannot be partners with each other?”
Um, yeah.
As the group shared their concerns, it was hard for me not to blurt out my personal opinions about what they were saying. But I knew that anything I said would be interpreted as a Western mind telling Africans to change their ways without understanding why Africans are they way they are.
Instead, I let Godi talk. And he shined. All his experience counseling VCT clients came through.
“It’s important to create an atmosphere of openness with your children, so they’ll feel like they can talk to you about things.”
“If you act like sex is a shameful thing, like flipping off the TV with no further explanation, your kids will think it’s a shameful thing that shouldn’t be talked about.”
“You need to empower your kids with all the information about sex, so they can make choices for themselves.”
Exactly what I would have said. The group was really receptive, but I think if I had said the same thing, they might not have accepted it as readily as they did when it came from Godi, a fellow Kenyan.
The next day of the workshop, half the group reported that they had talked to their partners and kids about HIV with great success, and one woman’s husband even wanted to visit a VCT.
[Next installment: Day 2.]
posted by Justina at 10:30 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home