The first week after the second school term ended, I mainly stayed at home and dealt with medical stuff and laundry. The subsequent week consisted of my “Cross Sector Training.”
Each Peace Corps training so far has a handy abbreviation: Pre-Service Training (my time in Loitokitok) was “PST,” In-Service Training (my trip to Nairobi after the first school term) was “IST” and now Cross-Sector Training is “CST.” CST this year is split into two different places: Mombasa (technically Babmuri (pronounced bamBOOdee) Beach) and Nairobi. As a result it’s half the size as previous trainings. It’s also optional, and counterparts are invited.
Ever volunteer has (or should have) a counterpart, who is a local Kenyan peer you work alongside rather than under. My counterpart is another teacher here at the school, but he was unable to make it to the training. Here is is with his baby:
Anyhow, I haven’t written much about my training experiences in the Peace Corps, mostly because it’s far too easy to be overly critical of this side of Peace Corps’ operations, and its not worth getting too worked up about because, outside of language, training has little to do with the overall experience here.
This training was a little different, though.
Firstly, it was better. Unlike the Nairobi training, we were much more pampered, which is quite welcome considering I live less than half an hour from the hotel yet I live in relative squalor. While I was there I found myself taking showers just because I could. But it wasn’t the pampering or the large buffets that made it better, it was the presence of the counterparts. By and large they kept us volunteers from acting obnoxiously during training activities, and in a number of activities, with the right combination of listeners present, they actually did a lot of talking themselves, asking questions and sharing opinions.
Sitting by one of the hotel pools and looking in at one of the bars:
One thing that I was previously unaware of, which was brought up by a counterpart: children at Kenyan schools are generally under the impression that the schools put kerosene (called paraffin here) in the food in order to suppress their sexual appetites. The Kenyan teachers in my group estimated that they believe this really does happen in 80% of schools, but everyone agreed that it doesn’t seem to be working.
As the entire training was supposedly HIV/AIDS-centric, I also did a lot of thinking about the statistics (big picture: 7-8% of Kenyans have HIV/AIDS). I came around to a new idea, at least for me. In my opinion, there is an answer to “Why is the AIDS epidemic so big here?” but it’s an answer that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere.
I think it’s because there is little/no condom use her for the sake of birth control. Despite all the efforts to promote condoms, people generally don’t use them, and people generally look a them negatively. I think this is because the benefits of birth control are not being advertised nearly enough. As a result, the only reason most people would use a condom is to avoid AIDS, which in turn stigmatizes the purchase of condoms (“Why’s he buying a condom? He must have AIDS!”) and it makes trust an issue in relationships when one partner wants to use a condom (“Are you suggesting that I haven’t been faithful?”).
Even if the partner doesn’t care for the birth control side of things, at least making it an issue for teens would remove the stigma of condoms being strictly AIDS-stoppers. The over-emphasis on AIDS has made condoms into bad things.
The underlying problem is of course that you need to see the value of fewer children if you are going to see the value in birth control, and that’s hard to push in agrarian cultures with high infant mortality rates. Boys and men especially see no reason for birth control, since their lives remain basically the same after having a baby. Out of wedlock, there is no cultural or legal pressure for a man to support the child in almost any way. The most opportune place for intervention, then, would appear to be with girls. If you can convince a girl that her life would be better if she gets through school without getting pregnant, she can make that case to future boyfriends and as a side effect, she can also avoid HIV. Voila, problem solved.
I tossed this concept around throughout the week and it seemed to gain some traction. Thoughts?
This bring my to my next topic: PEPFAR. PEPFAR is the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. It’s basically a pool of US money to fund AIDS stuff. PEPFAR sponsored the CST training. PEPFAR also sponsors many of the Peace Corps volunteers outright, meaning that many of us are paid for not out of Peace Corps budget, but out of PEPFAR’s, even though very few of us actually focus on HIV/AIDS issues.
I must admit that this bothers me a little. Reading between the lines, it appears that PEPFAR wants to raise the number of people in Africa who have been educated about HIV/AIDS, and Peace Corps wants to be able to afford more volunteers. By training all volunteers about HIV/AIDS, presumably for some specific number of hours as required by PEPFAR, Peace Corps can claim that all volunteers are HIV/AIDS educators, and at least on paper, PEPFAR’s “people touched in some way by HIV/AIDS educators” number gets a nice boost.
PEPFAR is huge. There’s a ton of money, and I’ve seen many instances of it being put to use in borderline-relevant ways, and more and more I’m feeling like somewhere along the way PEPFAR just started wanting numbers, and everyone else realized this and learned how to integrate HIV activities in token ways just to get PEPFAR’s money. Then I think about how nice the showers were at training, and then I feel guilty because they were paid for by PEPFAR. It’s hard to get too upset because in many cases it’s like (or may even literally be) stealing from the sick to feed the hungry, which is not itself a terrible thing, but now I can’t help but look at PEPFAR statistics, and statistics from similar organizations, which a much more jaded eye.
