World AIDS Day/Thanksgiving

World AIDS day is December 1st every year, but this year the school system of Burkina decided to do some activities on November 25th, which you may or may not remember was Thanksgiving this year! So while I didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving in any sort of food related way, it was fun to have a day out of the ordinary :)
In French, HIV/AIDS is VIH/SIDA, so almost the same. AIDS is NOT a large problem in Burkina Faso, I believe that the reported number of infected is only around 2%. This is very very small compared to eastern and southern African countries that have as much as 15% of the population infected. Either way, AIDS is taken very seriously, and is more of a starting ground to talk about issues more immediate to the people here, such as STIs/STDs and unwanted pregnancy. I hope I’m not coming off as downplaying the severity of the AIDS pandemic in other parts of the world, or even to those with AIDS here in Burkina, but even without having any information on me, I’m quite confident in saying that both Malaria and malnutrition individually cause more deaths a year than AIDS here in Burkina. So while it is very important that students are informed about what AIDS is and how it is and isn’t spread, a lot of the conversations during the day turned towards unwanted pregnancy which affects many many many of the girls in my classroom.
That morning all the students at school cleaned the school and CSPS grounds. Then two of the nurses from the CSPS came over and gave a lesson on what is AIDS. They talked to the entire school at the same time, and while I think they did a good job, I think it would have gone over much better to divide up age levels, if not age AND gender. There were 11 yr old kids who barely know what kissing is right there next to sexually active 19-20 yr olds who tried insisting that abstinence isn’t possible.
There were the usual misconceptions about how AIDS is and isn’t transmitted, and the one that really seemed to hang them up was mosquitoes. Mosquitoes cannot transfer AIDS/HIV from one person to another, and after how much they talk about malaria here, it was a little hard for students (and teachers) to grasp that they aren’t a problem for AIDS. We also talked for a while about mother/child transmission.
In the US, if a mother with HIV/AIDS were to give birth to a child, I have no doubt that it would be a C-section birth and that the mother would never breastfeed. Now think about rural Africa… The nearest facility capable of performing a C-section is 75km down the dirt road, a trip that normally takes at least 2 hours and cost about half a week’s salary, let alone the medical costs. And if a mother didn’t breastfeed, the child would starve. So, in Africa, they do actually recommend that the mother breastfeed. The transfer rate is so low that the benefits greatly outweigh the risk to the child.
By the end of the lesson by the nurses, the conversation had turned towards abstinence and how to avoid pregnancy. The profs and nurses both strongly encouraged the students to wait, at least until they were done with school, before having sex. I’m not sure how that went over, but we’ll just have to look and see at the end year.
That afternoon we had a soccer match between the 4e and 3e girls, just for a little bit of fun to reward the students for all the work they did that morning. But, when the profs said that it would be for fun, I didn’t realize that it would be for entertainment. When the girls got out there to play, the entire student body just laughed at them. It was obvious that they’ve never received any sort of training in strategy of playing the game, and all followed the ball around like a herd. I was really upset and tried to give the girls some pointers, but as most of you know, my sports knowledge and ability is quite limited… It was just so frustrating to see the girls out there trying their best, and getting laughed at, even when they were doing really well. Just the idea of girls playing sports is funny enough to set them off sometimes. I could (and probably will at some point) write a whole post on just this, but don’t feel quite ready to really elaborate at the moment…
All in all, not your typical Thanksgiving, but a good day, and definitely important message for the students. The next day, I explained what Thanksgiving is to each of my classes, just like I made them explain Tiimbe to me. It was really hard to try and explain a cranberry or pie to my students though :P