Wrapping Up HIV/AIDS Education

I will begin this post in the same manner I began the first real lessons in my grade 11 and 12 Life-Skills classes (after playing a game of tag outside where one in six learners started as “It”).

Here are the facts:

In 2007, 15.3% of Namibian adults were HIV+.
That is approximately one in six adults.
In 2008 Namibia had the sixth highest HIV prevalence rate in the world.
Almost all of the remaining top five are Namibia’s neighbors (Botswana, South Africa, etc).
In 2001 approximately 40,000 Namibian children were orphans because their parents had died of HIV/AIDS.
There are 700 learners at Oshikunde School.
That is 57 Oshikundes full of children with no parents.

This is a problem.

After the first week of class rules, introductions, and answering questions about where Maryland is and how long it took me to get to Namibia, I dove headfirst into heavy material with my oldest learners. This was partially because as I researched the HIV situation in Namibia I considered it rather important, and it was partially because I wasn’t exactly sure what “Life-Skills” was.

We spent our first class getting facts out in the open, confronting myths, and answering anonymously submitted questions. After I made a trip to the local, free, confidential HIV testing center, New Start (funded by USAID, represent!) lesson number two was on available testing, treatment, and support. This week in lesson four we will conclude the unit with role plays and by making HIV/AIDS Awareness posters to hang around the school grounds. In my Life-Skills planning notebook, that left lesson three for condom demonstrations. This is something that I had not envisioned myself ever doing…ever. But as they say, practice makes perfect, and if you are the Life-Skills teacher for all but one of the grade 11 and grade 12 classes, by the end of the week your presentation skills get perfected.

I fine tuned my performance to impart all the necessary information while still including qualifications that I was not endorsing promiscuity and that abstinence is hands down the most effective method of prevention, moments of seriousness to emphasize the gravity of the risk in Namibia, and of course jokes spaced out through the demonstration to keep things comfortable. One digression was a story about why Mr. Brent brought a flashlight to class. You see, for the first week of his stay in Oshikunde, Mr. Brent had no working light bulbs, so he would walk around his house with a flashlight squeezed between his cheek and his shoulder. But Mr. Brent would drop it [drop the flashlight to gasps from the learners] over, and over, and over again, so now it doesn’t work. But today [thrust the flashlight high overhead], today it will be used! Do we know what it will be used as? [Chuckles and emphatic nods from the learners].

To be perfectly honest, I was more than a little nervous about putting on these demonstrations. I wasn’t sure how the learners would respond, and I also was uncertain how the other teachers would react if they got word of my presentations. But the old Life-Skills syllabus I received does explicitly state that the overarching theme of HIV Awareness should be present in as many lessons as possible, so before my first demo I took a deep breathe and just went for it. To begin I would get all my learners to put their heads down so no one could see anyone else and then give a thumbs up if they knew how to use a condom properly or a thumbs down if they did not. Seeing over half of my learners (who in these classes are often twenty years of age or older) not answer at all, which I took as a “no”, and many others quickly put their thumbs down, was all I needed to press on with confidence. And during one of my last Life-Skills lessons of the week, because I do not have my own classroom, the Head of Department for Sciences (basically the vice-principal) was in the room grading papers, and as a result was witness to my lesson. It felt great, as I went through the presentation and answered questions, to notice him nodding his head in approval and even occasionally laughing quietly at my antics.

We’ll see during Wednesday’s staff meeting if I get chastised for transgressing some rules of propriety, but I seriously doubt it. And even if I do, as it stands now close to 250 young Namibian adults know, for certain, a skill that could save their lives. If it’s not in the syllabus it should be.