Mambo?![1]
So, it’s Christmas Eve as I’m writing this! We’re having a Christmas party at
SAWAKA today: Elf, food, Christmas songs, decorations, socks; merry-making…
We’re all really excited, but at the same time it just feels like we’re
pretending it’s Christmas because it’s 30®C, we’re surrounded by banana trees
instead of pine trees and there isn’t a Father Christmas in sight. I’m sure
watching Elf will ignite the Christmas spirit, though.
 |
| The School In Irundu |
So, seeing as all of the schools we’re working in have
broken up for Christmas now, we’ve been concentrating on community members.
Last week we ran a session in a village called Irundu, which is my favourite
venue of them all. It’s a nursery school, which consists of one classroom on
the side of a mountain. Looking out of the shuttered windows, all you can see
are green slopes and the sky. It’s awesome!
Our first session
there went really well; there were lots of young people there, with a broad age
range of 14 to 30, and they were really engaged and asked lots of questions.
Bonnavitha, a TNZ volunteer in our team, made a good impression on the group,
her number having been requested many times since. We went back yesterday for
our second session on STIs and it was disappointing, unfortunately. Four
community members returned, out of the previous group of about 15, and two of
these didn't arrive until about 2 hours after our session was supposed to
start! However, we did have a good session with them. It taught our Peer
Educators a lot, as well as the community members, and we were able to hand out
20 of the 200 condoms Philly and I bagged from the hospital. Yay!
Getting community members to return is a big issue we have
to address. Perhaps naively (?!) we believe everyone enjoys our sessions –
‘stay for longer!’; ‘can you come back tomorrow?’ – so we think it must be
forgetfulness and people being occupied that are preventing our second sessions from being as wicked as the first.
We’ve all agreed we need to repeatedly remind the community chairmen to gather
their youth for our follow-up sessions, as they’re the ones with influence and the
contacts.
On Wednesday we had a surprisingly wicked day, which has
become the highlight of the programme so far for Philly, Bonnavitha and me. We
had session no.2 for the Nyakahanga community members and, again, the turnout
was pretty disappointing (3…). BUT, one of the older community members, who’s a
student at Nyakahanga hospital, taught us about Syphilis. We then taught him
back, sharing all the extra detail we’d learnt in our training, resulting in a
mega detailed session on Syphilis! THEN, we taught two sisters, 13 and 14,
about puberty. We started, expecting them to tell us lots, but it soon
transpired that they knew nothing about puberty. It’s amazing that these girls
can get to this age, where puberty is usually in full swing, without knowing
about the changes taking place in their bodies. It was great to see them
stopping to write extra notes down on their walk home after our session. Super
rewarding!
I’m going to join in the festivities at SAWAKA now. There
are lots of paper chains to be made! Have a lovely Christmas everyone; I’ll
write again sooooon!
[1] N.B.
- This is a difficult thing with Swahili greetings – they’re all questions, so
all require a response and are all really difficult to write excitedly without
coming across as really impatient/bewildered.
 |
| An awesome sunset over Omurushaka taxi rank |
No comments:
Post a Comment