December 21st, 2008:

Today is the start of my second week. I’ve decided which projects I am going to help with this week, as UKUN needs a lot of help to say the least.
Projects for this week are:

Building the duck pen for Mwanahawa.

Writing a grant to the Stephen Lewis foundation to try and get money for an IGA (income generating activities). We visited Zinga last week which is the most productive poultry farm here. We needed to understand costs, how it works etc. We’ll try and implement it here as a co-op with a woman’s group in the village to help those that have HIV/Aids/malaria, etc.

The last project is to help develop a curriculum for HIV/Aids education for the secondary school children (ages 14-21). We had a lesson, open discussion and answered anonymous questions on HIV/Aids with several of the local schools. The kids were much more likely to open up and ask questions when their teacher was not in the room. Many of the teachers were happy we were teaching about HIV/Aids, but one teacher undermined everything we were trying to do by telling the students that condoms only worked 50% of the time. It was extremely frustrating. We also had the kids fill out surveys. They were very open and honest. Now, we can go back and address their questions and hopefully follow progress on their perceptions/education every six months. At least that is the plan. Several students said they thought HIV came because the government in the USA made it in a laboratory to kill people in Africa. It was heart breaking to hear that was what they thought. Of course, we explained this was absolutely not true. Some students explained to us that it was taboo/against their traditions to use condoms. We asked them how they thought they could prevent the spread of HIV. Many students thought by fearing god more they wouldn’t get infected. On the other hand, many students believed condoms worked and I could tell they trusted us. I am definitely starting to bond with some of the students. They ask me a lot of questions and I really think they believe what I tell them. At least I hope I am getting through to some of them.

One idea I have proposed is to have an open forum where we meet with some of the traditional healers in the villages to understand their ways/beliefs and we can also share with them our beliefs, etc. Charles, the director here who is a native of Bagamoyo loved the idea, so he presented it to the council. Yes, they have a council of traditional healers that meets regularly. The traditional healers council has decided that yes, they would like to meet with us.

As a side note, someone is trying to sell me peanuts right now at this internet cafe (place, it is definitely not a cafe), so it is taking forever to write this...Also, ants are crawling all over me.