Training and Living the Volunteer Lifestyle

We moved out of our homestays and into the training facilities last Sunday. We had a big going away party for the homestay families where the Swahili teachers and the SPW staff spoke. Then a few of the international volunteers got up and gave a speech in Swahili thanking the famillies. Everyone cheered and clapped when they were done. It's amazing how quickly you can pick up a language when you are surrounded by it. We've been at the training center for a week now and it's also amazing how quickly the vocab can disappear when you are no longer practicing 6 hours a day.

The focus now is on learning to be peer educators and learning to teaching Sexual Reproductive Health and HIV/AIDS prevention to rural youth. Before I came here I had a vision that we would be working in stable communities with schools and health facilities that just needed extra help to push the message on HIV/AIDS prevention to young people. Now I realize stable community is a relative term in Africa and we are in the Iringa region for a reason. Tanzania has the third highest HIV infection rate in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Iringa region has the highest rate of infection in the country. The rosey picture of a small African town in the beautiful southern highlands were people are friendly and life is good that I got in the first three weeks of my stay here is gone. We are in the center of the pandemic. AIDS is a funny thing. It takes years for even untreated people to develop symptoms and then many people die of other infections before the virus has time to kill them. This means people can go for years without knowing they are infected and when they do get sick they can stay in denial about what illness they actually have. These factors and the fact the 80% of HIV infection in Tanzania happens through sexual transmisson mean there is a lot of confusion, myth and stigma surrounding the disease. SPW is working to combat this trifecta of complecations that make it especailly difficult to stop HIV from spreading.

The Tanzanian volunteers have joined us. They are young people from all over the country. Most of them have just finished their final year of secondary school and will start university in the fall. They are smart, attentive and obiviously hard working because the Tanzanian secondary school system is extremely rigorous and it is extremly difficult to get into University here. Although its obvious they are the cream of the crop, it's also obvious just how lacking they are in basic knowledge about reproductive health and even HIV transmisson and prevention. They are not getting the same kind of sex ed class American kids get. Much of what they know about sex and HIV comes from talking with friends, and their own experience. The training had to start from sqaure one, basic reproductive organs and their functions and the basic ways in which HIV can be transmitted. They all knew HIV is transmitted through sex But they didn't know what kinds of sex. Or why are women more easily infected. Or if it can be transmitted through saliva? There were a lot of myths and misconceptions mixed up with the facts in their brains because they had never had a clear, frank discussion of the facts about HIV. That clear frank discussion is part of what SPW volunteers will provide to the youth in the village, but if even the smartest young people in the country don't know fact from fiction imagine the kind of misconceptions a rural youth with little education will have. This is going to be a challenge! One of many.

Everyday I'm learning that this experience is going to be a serious test of patience, endurance, creativity and people skills. Thankfully we have some amazing staff members who were volunteers themselves in years past and understand the major challanges peer educators can face when they go into a rural community. We are also lucky enough to have an amazing yoga and medication teacher within the international volunteers who has been generous enough to teach a coarse on stress managment called The Art of Living. It's been taught all over the world in 140 diffrent countries. It's used by the United Nations in refugee camps to help councel trama victims. The breathing techniques the coarse teaches are used by millions of people and the Indian holy man who created them has been nominated for the Noble Prize three times. I found out today that Bill and Hillary Clinton even took the coarse. We are in our third day of the six day coarse and so far it is amazing. I'm feeling less stressed and concentrating more on what I can give rather than what I need. It's been a really powerful experience and I'm so grateful to be taking the coarse here in Tanzania right before I embark on this incredibly challanging adventure. I've had a lot of realizations in the past week both postivie and negative and I know the coming weeks will only bring more.