Sex Ed Take 2

This week we taught pronouns and then started on adjectives and emotions. The moral of the story is that the kids are very limited in their creative thinking. They can't come up with their own descriptive sentences. This is because of the emphasis on repetition and memorization in the classroom. They have many songs and series of dialogues that they have memorized but they don't know what they mean. For example, each morning goes something like this.

US: Good morning class!
Them: Good Morning Teacher!
Us: How are you?
Them: I am fine thank you teacher and you.
Us: We are fine, thank you.
Them: Thank you teacher, and you.
Us: We are fine, thank you.
Awkward pause.

They don't get that they have just asked the same question twice and haven't been corrected. We also started with comparisons (He is taller than me, I am older than her). After class on Thursday, we went back to Jumani's house, the young man with AIDS. He was excited to see us again.

Today we had support group with the women again. This time we introduced the female condom. Word has gotten out among the women in the neighborhood and we had a big crowd today. The women have never been taught about safe sex. They ask us all sort of questions about why they need to have safe sex and I have to remember that this is something that has been pounded into my brain forever and these women are just being exposed to it for the first time. At one point, one woman said that the condom was "destroying Tanzanian culture".

There are a plethora of misguided theories about safe sex and sex in general. Most of the time I feel as if support group is just Sex Myth Busters. Here are some of the ones we "busted" today.
Every time you have sex, four years of your life is taken away.
You will get really sick if you don't have sex for too long.
Men will get a fungus if they use a condom.
A condom is not large enough.
One of my favorite questions though was "why do men want sex all the time"? All of the women laughed and swapped stories along this line and it is really apparent that they all enjoy this much needed female time. The topic of sex is a very male dominated one, and culturally the men are in charge of everything that has to do with sex. Again, it was really successful. We handed out condoms (both male and female) at the end and the women clambered all over each other for them.