Working in the Healthy Schools Project in primary schools has not given me a lot of opportunities to continue in this line of work, but I have collaborated with a number of volunteers to give HIV lessons to high school students. Because sexual education is deeply lacking here and the subject is taboo, we have to be careful about what we say and what we teach. The community members in my friend's site still talk about this past volunteer who showed porn to students (we are fairly certain that they were just trying to teach a health lesson). So we always get permission beforehand and co-facilitate with Guatemalans so that it isn't just us. We also watch what we say and stress abstinence.
Each time we give the training a little differently, but we usually show an animated informational video and do a white blood cell activity where you have kids act out a story and portray the immune system, different infections, HIV, the human body, etc. We also do SIDA/NODA (determining what activities/things that can transmit the virus), true/false activities, and so on.
I have done a number of trainings in different schools, but this was the largest at a private school in Xela. It was an all girls school. It was also the nicest looking school that I have been to in Guatemala.
This was the only time that I have done a condom demonstration. We passed out cards, each with a step of putting on a condom, and the girls had to put them in order and then demonstrate each step. In the first group we got a couple girls to touch the condom, but in all future groups we did it because they were all too embarrassed.
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| This was the only group of girls that was willing to touch the condom. |
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| For some reason this hanging photo creeped me out. |
Could you get a feel for how familiar these students were with HIV and AIDS before you spoke with them? That is, did you have or did the teachers provide any baseline for what they knew about the diseases (accurate or not) and how they were transmitted before your charla? I'm guessing that the girls are not likely to carry on the discussion among themselves--and certainly not with most of their parents. So it would be up to the school to do the follow up and later reinforcement of the message.
ReplyDeleteI have a sense that HIV/AIDS is not at the top of the public health needs and concerns in Guatemala.
We don't usually give out baseline surveys (except at the training at the health center) but we usually do some kind of activity to find out what they know about HIV. Which is usually not a whole lot.
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