HIV/AIDS Awareness Training, FEb 20-22, 2007

Trip Start Feb 02, 2007

Trip End Mar 30, 2007

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Flag of Benin Porto Novo, Benin
Friday, February 23, 2007

During the week of Feb 19th both the Cotonou and Porto Novo groups began working with the local Beninoise youth. The youth that were part of the 3 day tranining have been selected from their schools as the future peer educators for thier school. In total, Porto Novo team had approx 24 youth and us the 5 Canadians. It was great! We learned tons about HIV/AIDS and more importantly the difficulties and beliefs that exist in this community. The Beninin youth we worked with were for the most part very involved and outgoing. Although they were an educated and wellspoken group, it was interesting to find that still many of them maintained cultural and traditional beliefs in a way that impacts the spread of HIV/AIDS and STDS in Benin. For instance having a mistress is generally accepted, men are the "cheif" of the home so disobeying them is disrespectful and can jepordise a marriage, majority of the Beninoise youth agreed that women are liars and thier bigest desires are to get married and have children

End of the day pic

. Sex is seen as a necessity to good heath and starting early is a means to ensure fertility. Other intersting comments were: whether HIV is carried in Condoms, if AIDS exists in other countries, that maybe AIDS was created by white people "yovos" to sell condoms to Africa.

It was incredible to learn everything these youth think about AIDS and how misinformed they are. We feel overall that the training went well and that the fascilitators worked hard to educate these youth and give them tools to dispell the myths that we will all encounter in the field. However, there are some societal and cultural beliefs within the group and Benin that will be difficult to overcome. We feel one of the biggest challenges in combating AIDS in Benin is the situation of women, the illiteracy rate of women is 76% which is the result of the of the fact that only 58% of girls attend primary education and only 12% attend secondary education. This means very little women will be able to read about AIDS, if explained few will be able to comprehend the problem and as a result will not understand why they should use preventatives or alternative techniques for good health. Most importantly very few are able to be self reliant and many are forced to accept everything that comes with an unbalanced society.

Since the tranining we have worked with the peer educators to come up with awareness activities that will be conducted within their local schools in the next 3 weeks. It has been fun trying to get them to think outside the lecture box! The teaching style here is very directive and doesn't involve a lot of interaction. We are quite happy to finally be doing some 'real' work and are thrilled to have things planned for the rest of the month. The next major event is the Megga HIV/AIDS awarensess Conference on March 10th, at 15h00. Yes, they use 24 hrs here! Stay tuned.

Cindy and Dana