Anyway. Rant over. Lee is a very nice lady, and I respect what she is doing with her life. We also had a conversation about Christianity (everyone in the charity is evangelical Christian), and at least she accepted the fact that we’re not Christian and not likely to become Christian any time soon.
After a while the children came – someone had driven 25 of them up from Old Naledi. We first gave them food (rice, beef and vegetable stew) and then started the talk. Lee needed to translate even though they knew some English, partly because of the difficulty of the topic and partly because they can’t understand our accents/how fast we speak. I know this seems maybe a bit pointless, but they seemed very keen for us to do it, both because we’re young and because we’re foreigners, they think it will have a larger affect on the children than just the same old coming from their mouths. Also I think our talk was quite different in many ways from how a Motswana would phrase things and talk about it, although of course you can’t really tell how your words are being translated.
So we spoke first about why they shouldn’t really be having sex yet (as the oldest was 13 I had no qualms about that). Martha says that it is a problem when the whole family lives in one room the kids obviously get curious about this sex thing that their older sibling/parents are doing. We spoke about how Botswana has a very high rate of HIV (24.1%), and so they must be particularly careful, even more so than in other countries. We asked them if they knew how HIV was spread (“if you have sex without a condom!”), and spoke about the importance of being careful with blood, not drinking from the same cup as people who have sores on their lips, etc. Also how people can look healthy but still have the virus, so you should be careful around everyone and importantly, not treat people with HIV any different to other people. Then we used something from a voluntary sex-ed thing I did in the UK four years ago, which is telling them how to resist unwanted sexual advances (say no, leave the room if that doesn’t work). All mixed up with stuff about respecting your body and that sex is not just a physical thing, it also affects your emotions. Finally we told them that if anyone ever did anything to them that they did not want to happen, the most important thing is to tell a trusted adult about it immediately (we had been asked to include this. I think abuse can sadly common). We asked them to think about who they would be able to tell, and then Lee asked if anyone couldn’t think of anyone. Four children put their hands up. We asked them why they didn’t have anyone they could turn to for help. Two of them said that their parent (only one was mentioned in each case) was out all the time and they didn’t know where they went or what they were doing. The other two were orphans and said they didn’t trust the family that they lived with at all (the UN Development Agency estimated that 20% of all children in Botswana will be orphans by 2010). Lee took their names so the charity could keep an eye on them and asked them to please come to her for help if they ever needed it. Then (after the obligatory prayer interspersed with hysterical giggling), they all scrambled into the back of one bucky (pick-up truck), bar two who sat in the passenger seat, and went back home. Next week we are going to two villages and will give a talk there to older kids, talking more about condoms and other such wonderful things.
After washing up the kid’s plates we went back home. Auntie June was sitting in the kitchen in front of three huge boxes of pills and potions. They run a pharmacy and these were all the out of date medicines from the past year or so. She asked for our help so we sat down with her. The government has ordered that all out of date pills be destroyed, because people pick through the rubbish dumps and they are worried that they may harm themselves by taking out of date or the wrong pills. So we were putting them all in a big bucket filled with liquid (diarrhoea medicine actually), popping them out of their foil casing and throwing them in to be dissolved. We sat there for at least an hour, it was actually pretty satisfying, and we got scarily into it, even figuring out how to use an out of date needle to get the insulin out of the container for diabetics, as there seemed to be no way to pour it out. The mixture was pretty crazy, all these gelatine capsules floating to the top, the smell was really strong. Our favourite pills were these tiny little pink heart shaped anti-depressants, and my favourite job was puffing all the stuff out of inhalers until they were empty. Apparantly the mixture will eventually turn into a solid ‘stone’ which they will then throw away.
No comments:
Post a Comment