Oh the small humorous moments...

I just wrapped up a month long soccer tournament/HIV seminar for young guys in my village. During the last class, I answered general questions about HIV transmission, condom use, and the myths surrounding these topics. I decided to get one of the participants to explain and demonstrate how to properly use a condom using an empty coke bottle, which went fine. I ended up stuffing this demo condom back in the box to throw away in the garbage basket in my kitchen when I got home.
As I believe I have previously mentioned, I have a crew of boys in the hood that like to hang out/terrorize my house on a regular basis. My most faithful little friend underfoot is the youngest son of my neighbor. He likes to just sit on my kitchen floor and watch me cook (aka wait for me to give him some of whatever food I’m making) while he practicing writing the numbers 1-10 over and over on some notebook paper. Another of his favorite pastimes is to dig through my garbage and find things to play with…
So imagine my surprise when one day last week I am sitting at my ‘dining room’ table writing a letter and out of the corner of my eye, there’s little 6 year old Yosiah, with a bright red strawberry scented condom in his mouth trying to blow it up like a balloon. Priceless.

What its really like

People are always wanting to know, so what is like? Really? Well, its hard to explain. It’s a world of opposites and contradictions. Its up or its down. Its exciting to be so far out of the box, out on my own, living my life…but then again there’s homesickness. Its exhilarating to see the enthusiasm for plans for development at village meetings…and incredibly frustrating when nothing happens beyond the planning stages. Its nice to be able to just slow down the pace of life and smell the roses a bit if you will…and also so annoying when that lack of concept of time means that if you plan a meeting for 8:00 nobody shows up until 9:45. Its great to have some time to myself to just read, relax, and just think…but too much time to myself turns into loneliness and extreme boredom. It’s the day to day that is the biggest challenge. I’m all about planning big projects and have several in the works. But most of them are things that may only last a day or two and that’s it. We have a health/career seminar coming up next month and a girl’s empowerment camp the month after. But we’ve pretty much finished planning them. What am I supposed to do until the time comes around for them to take place? Sleep. Cook. Clean. Read. Give the crazy neighborhood boys candy to make them stop running and screaming around my house. Clean up after crazy neighborhood boys. Cook again. Write letters. Read again. Cook again. Sleep.
There’s still moments when I ask myself what in the world I am doing with my life right now. Did I come to Africa just to read, cook, and sleep? Did I come to sit in a house all day alone and listen to the rain that inevitably comes at some point every single day? But then there’s those moments that remind me what the whole purpose of it all is. For instance right now I’m facilitating a HIV info oriented soccer tournament for teenage/twenty-somethings boys in my village. I, along with my counterpart Lupogo, teach a 45 minute lesson about HIV/STDs/condoms and things of that nature before each of the games. This Monday we played a fact/myth game to instigate discussion about various rumors associated with HIV. One of the questions was whether or not there are tiny wholes in condoms that allow HIV to pass through. The guys were supposed to go to one side of the room if they thought this was true, the other if they thought it was a lie, and hang out in the middle if they weren’t sure. The majority stayed in the middle, a good amount went to the true side and a handful went to the lie side. But what was interesting was during the discussion that followed the movement, one guy said that he heard that there were some condoms that carried HIV themselves! I tried to explain that HIV must live inside of a liquid (blood, semen, vaginal fluid, or breast milk) so it would therefore be impossible for a condom itself to be infected, but I’m not so sure he believed me. The point is, we threw out some pretty far reaching myths and every time there were at least a few people who believed they were true. So I felt like I was doing something semi-productive by at least giving them the facts and stimulating the discussion.
Things move along pretty slowly around here. It’s difficult to see real changes. There’s always setbacks. Like with my community garden project to improve nutrition and income status in my village. I wrote the grant, got the money, bought the supplies… now I’ve just got to get the people to show up to plant it! But at least the orphans have managed to take their share and plant a vegetable garden at the primary school and the group of people with HIV in my village have planted their own garden to share. The people who were most interested in the idea in the first place have yet to do their part, but oh well. The people who need it the most seemed to have benefited.
So there you have it. This is pretty much my life as a PCV.