A Day in the Community

Last week I went to my first community campaign for HIV/AIDS. Fortunately where I live, there are lots of these that go on. The campaign this month was geared towards behavior change. What that means is getting people to change the way the think and act in terms of their sexual decisions. Here in Swaziland, a lot of people use the excuse of culture to justify their promiscuity. Polygamy is still an active practice here, though it is decreasing in the younger generations; but MCP (multiple concurrent partnerships) is still very prevalent.  Back in the day, Swazi culture deemed it acceptable for a man to have multiple wives. The difference between then and now is that the man did not sleep with the woman until she was his wife. In theory, sexual active was bound to the man and his wives. However today this is not the case. 

[In case I haven’t mentioned this yet, Swaziland has the highest rate in the world for HIV. About 40% of people between the ages of 18-49 have HIV. Even more shocking, the community where I live, as well as the neighboring communities where I also work, have the highest rate in all the country, (one community has over 80% of people between the ages of 18-49 with HIV).  For security and sensitivity reasons, I don’t want to list any of these communities by name; just know that it is a major issue here and EVERYONE is affected by HIV in one way or another.  For many of you in the States, you will never know what it is like—even I am still trying to fully understand it.]

So now that I’ve mentioned a little bit about HIV statistics, I want to bring it back to the polygamy and MCP. “Culturally” a man is defined by how many wives he has, and or how many girlfriends he has. I don’t know where this got lost in translation, but if you ask any ‘old school’ Swazi, the men didn’t sleep with these girlfriends until they were married. Today the men think that before they marry the woman, they have to “test the goods”. This is why I put quotations around culturally, because “culturally” the men didn’t sleep with women that weren’t their wives, but the past couple generations think they have to. So now you have these men with 3-5 wives who sleep with girls before they marry them, then the men go back and sleep with their wives. If the man was just infected with HIV, he spread it to the whole network of people he was sleeping with. The same is true with men who have MCP, they sleep with multiple women in the same period of time. If the man has HIV, he has just spread it to that whole network of people he’s been in bed with. If you put two and two together, you can see how HIV has spread so widely here. 

This is why the campaign I just worked at focused on behavior change…. It was to encourage people to stay faithful to their partner. The slogan they used was “Tsembeka kulotansdzana naye uncobe i-HIV/AIDS”. It basically means, staying faithful to your partner will prevent HIV.  My mission here in Swaziland is Youth Development; at least that is what my title says. A lot of the work I do will deal with behavior change. In case you haven’t noticed, behavior change takes a lot of time; and more than likely, I won’t be around to see the long term impact I’ve made, since I’m only here for 2 years.  However at this HIV campaign I attended this past week, I was able to record a minor success—and it has nothing to do with HIV, but rather community. 

Let me tell you what happened. I was at the site watching a group of people try to set up a tent for the event. There were at least 13 of them gathered around holding poles, looking all types of confused. Rather than staying in the car waiting on my counterpart (who was also the only one I knew there), I decided to add a 14^th person to the madness and hold up a pole. Not speaking their language, I simply observed and tried to interject with hand motions if I thought it might help.  After being unintentionally pushed out of the circle, I saw the group of men claim defeat and put all the poles down and walk away. Not wanting to give up on this tent, I started looking closer at the poles and saw that they had labels on them, and that it was actually somewhat of a puzzle. While I have never EVER put a tent up before in my life, I knew I could do this. So I called a few of the men back over to help me; by the way, there were about 80 people crowded around watching me center stage as I tried to assemble this thing—no pressure. I pointed to the labels on the poles and showed them how to sort it out so they could see that there was a system to this. Eventually I had all 13 men back over here watching for me to give the next move. Within 10 minutes we had the tent up! Just a moment ago, they were ready to walk away and say forget it, but now I was applauding them as they had the tent assembled! 

This story is an example of how my work in Peace Corps will go—I observe, I help, and I try to show things in a different light. These guys who I helped, work in the sugar cane fields and are very good with their hands and manual labor; I on the other hand am not. But with my way of thinking, I look for an explanation and direction. I saw that the tent had all the materials it needed to be built, and we had the man power to put it up. They just needed someone to look at it from a different angle. My goal here is not to change the Swazi people to what I want or how I think it should go, but rather to show them other ways of doing things, so that it might make them a better person. And honestly, I am looking to learn a lot of new things from them too. 

Maybe after that day, one of those guys will look for directions before jumping into something and getting confused, maybe someone will learn to take leadership and others will listen, or maybe one of the females that was watching from the sidelines will see she is just as capable of “putting up a tent” as I was.  Or maybe all of them have forgotten about this event already. It really doesn’t matter; what matters was that in that moment, I was able to help a group of unfamiliar people come together and work to achieve a common goal. As minor as this was, that day, I helped someone see a challenge conquered.