Some thoughts from home...

Well I’m back in Canada and a little worse for the wear, but surviving. I had written another update to send out, but never really got around to it. These were my thoughts in my last week in Debre Sina:
It is not possible to do laundry when it is raining. You can put them on the line, and they just keep getting wetter.
Tania brought me back a container of Ethiopian Pringles from Addis. I ate one and literally started shaking they were so good. They were all laughing at me. Then I could only eat like 5 though as my stomach has apparently shrunken to the size of a peanut.
Last night we had our first official meeting with the Girls Club we are helping to start and facilitate. We are doing discussions with 11-18 yr old girls and they asked that we do the first session on Gender Equality. We ended up having a really intense discussion about girls’ roles in the community and the very high incidence of rape. They were talking about how basically nothing mattered as their parents would just marry them off young and their husbands would rape them. Or they could just get raped on the way to school. I don’t mean to make light of this or minimize it in any way, as it was actually very emotional for me to hear. How can an 11 year old possibly have the capacity to handle something like this? These girls have a strength I have rarely seen anywhere else.
We held a workshop over the weekend for women only. The first day was on HIV/AIDS, the second was on harmful traditional practices. The purpose behind having women only us so that they can open up and discuss things they might not in front of men. When we do co-ed workshops, they are generally very few women who say anything. This didn’t really work out as well as we had planned; most of the women were really quiet anyways. It really took until the second day for people to open up and that was only because of a specific incident. While Natalia was talking, we heard a noise that sounded like someone dragging something against the wall coming from the back of the room. We couldn’t figure out what it was. A few minutes later the smell made it pretty evident. Anyways, about half the class started laughing, which really confused Natalia who for some reason thought her face was bleeding. After that the class was much more cooperative. It’s a tip for everyone. If you’re ever running a workshop, just fart in the beginning, it really opens things up.
On the previous day I was giving a talk about HIV basics, as well as means of transmission. It was raining really hard that day, at some points so hard I could barely hear myself talk and I had to yell. While I was going over the methods of transmission, one of the girls asked what oral sex was as she had never heard this term. Right at this point the rain started pounding down and I literally had to scream out a description. Definitely a new experience.
One of the most interesting things that come out of these workshops is finding out what the myths are that are believed in the community. On our first day, one of the girls said that God can cure AIDS and that she knows someone who was cured. The basic belief is that if you go to church and pray, God will answer your prayers and cure you. There is very little that I can say to disprove this, especially without insulting one’s religious beliefs. This one girl in particular was adamant that this was true. I’m just not sure why you would even come to a workshop to learn how to prevent HIV if this is the case. If you’re infected, God will just cure you. I have to believe that somewhere deep down she thinks this might not be true and so our information might actually be helpful.
One of the other difficulties is that I sometimes think we hold these women to a higher standard than we hold ourselves. We tell them that to prevent HIV, it is important to use a condom during every sexual encounter. This is the best way to be safe. One of the young women was married and expressed that she wouldn’t ask her husband to do that. We know that it is important to use a condom anyways because we can never be sure of faithfulness, particularly in a community where a lot of men work out of town. But honestly, would we ask our husbands to use a condom every single time? I can’t really answer that but I do think it is a difficult standard to uphold. All we can really do is make recommendations and hope that these women apply it to their lives in the way that is most appropriate for themselves.