World AIDS Day

Happy World AIDS Day!

I remember living in America, being blissfully ignorant about the vital importance of this day and continued work in HIV care and treatment. My how things change!

Now, I live in Lesotho, surrounded by the second highest HIV rate in the world. When people die from illness, it is almost always HIV-related. When people die from illness, HIV is almost never mentioned.

Just as it does in America, HIV in Lesotho continues to carry an incredible stigma and huge amounts of discrimination. It seems that in America, because it can be transmitted through sexual activity and intravenous drug use, it is seen as scary and the repercussions of someone’s sins. The reality is, however, that here in Lesotho, the people most likely to contract HIV are young women ages 15-24. Many contract HIV through unprotected sex with their husband or an older partner. Many do not feel empowered to say no to sex or to insist upon condom usage in their relationship. Many have had only one partner.

Dribbling around risks
in life is an important
skill.

It is time for us as a world to look past the fallacy that someone did something wrong to contract HIV and to instead move toward helping to limit the scope of this disease.

Thanks to Anti-retroviral therapies, a person with HIV can live a long and productive life through maintenance medication, just as a person with diabetes, high blood pressure, and any number of other chronic conditions can. Additionally, an HIV positive person who religiously takes their medications can decrease their viral load so profoundly that the risk of them passing it to a sexual partner or to a child through birth or breast milk is incredibly reduced. There is simply no reason to stigmatize this disease!

A participant does push ups after hitting the "cone" for
risk of multiple partners during Risk Field.

For World AIDS Day here in Lesotho, my awesome counterparts and I added to the PC Skillz Grassroot Soccer Intervention we were already doing. Our practices today playing a game called Risk Field which uses risks like older partners, multiple partners, not using condoms, and combing alcohol and sex to show how HIV impacts not only the infected person but their family and friends and their entire community. We also played a game called Fact or Nonsense, which let us decide whether statements were true or not before learning more about the real facts. 

We finished up the day with empowerment. Since the theme of this year's World AIDS Day is "The Time to Act is Now," everyone came up with something they can do to help stop the impact of HIV/AIDS. Here is what they shared: 

Fact: Abstinence is the most effective way to avoid HIV.

Fact: The older your sexual partner, the more likely you are to get HIV.

"I will advise them [infected persons] to go to the health center for ARVs"

"I will tell them to abstain from sex..."

"I will form a social group"

"I will advise people to use condoms when having sex."

"I will tell them to go to the hospital.
I will tell them to have one boyfriend or girlfriend."

"I will tell them to have protected sex."

"I will abstain."

I will use condoms every time I have sex."

 How will you help reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS?
The time to act is now!

PCV Profile: Torle

Torle in her kobo and seshoeshoe on our swearing in day.

Torle is another PCV who arrived in Lesotho with me back in June of 2014. She is a vibrant and energetic young woman who calls Utah home but has traveled and lived all over including elsewhere in Africa and Alaska. She has an incredible singing and beat boxing talent and definitely qualifies as the coolest basketball player in Peace Corps Lesotho.

Given her affinity and experience with team sports, it is not surprising that Peace Corps placed her with the Leseli Youth Sports Organization in Teyateyaneng or TY. Leseli Youth Sports works  on youth development by encouraging youth to engage in healthy, active lifestyles. Youth participate through football (soccer for the American readers), basketball, and volleyball teams; although predominantly football. When she arrived at site, she found she had a jam packed schedule from the beginning. Torle found herself coaching multiple youth teams and visiting the many local schools in and around TY.

Torle's counterpart teaching life skills in GRS

After we attended the Grassroot Soccer training last November, she augmented those school visits to include the GRS PC Skillz curriculum, teaching teens life skills and HIV Prevention messages using football drills. Currently, she is in secondary schools three days a week. She also coaches basketball, volleyball, and netball. Netball is a women's sport somewhere similar to basketball but with different rules about passing and traveling, there is no recognizable dribbling that basketball players would identify. She also works with the LBA or Lesotho Basketball Association and teaches a Zumba class for women in her village.

Torle has been working incredibly hard with her counterparts to help them complete an impressively large project for their community. After doing Needs Assessments with the many youth in her organization, they decided to build a multipurpose sports court for youth in the Teyateyaneng area. As Teyateyaneng is one of the larger towns in Lesotho, this court has the possibility to be used by thousands of youth.

Preparation for the new sports court begin.

In the interest of capacity building and empowering the youth she is working with, Torle and her counterpart created a really strong Youth Committee. They visited the seven secondary or high schools in TY and requested the school nominate the three most outstanding students with an interest in sports. These twenty-one youth were then interviewed in English before the group was narrowed down to five girls and five boys. The Youth Committee meets every Friday. They have been working on every detail of the project from the beginning.

The Committee co-wrote the project proposal and donation request letters. The teens then visited area business owners to ask for their involvement. They did a phenomenal job, as they have five large construction and building supply owners donating many materials, the labor, and all equipment for construction of their Multi-purpose Sports Court. This left them to continue fundraising only for four materials and meals for their laborers. They are planning and implementing a number of community events to raise funds to feed their volunteer laborers on workdays. And, with Torle, they have written and been approved for a Peace Corps Partnership Program or PCPP grant. Their PCPP grant is currently active with Peace Corps if you are interested in taking a closer look.

Girls doing a drama as part of GRS.

Torle recently also became the Grassroot Soccer Coordinator for Lesotho. As the coordinator, she helps and supports the PCVs in Lesotho who have been through the GRS training and are doing GRS Interventions. She also serves as the conduit between the GRS staff in Cape Town, the Peace Corps staff in Maseru, and the PCVs in country. It a lot to add onto an already busy woman's shoulders, however, with her passion for youth sports and programming.

 

A crew clearing the area where the sports court will be.

Torle's many well trained and incredibly motivated GRS Co-Coaches.

Workshop Woe

My journal entry from Monday:

Today this week was incredibly challenging, in all likelihood the toughest day I have had in Lesotho yet. It was the day of our mini-PDM workshop. It was going to be long and difficult no matter what.

Then I learned this morning that Ausi Mareisi, my counterpart, had to work...but, 'M'e Mamphatsoe saud someone was calling her supervisor to get her the time off to join me in co-leading the workshop as planned. Despite this reassurance, I could not help but be anxious.

This was my nightmare. The very idea of doing the workshop effectively with people who speak no English, using only my decent but inadequate Sesotho skills has literally been my worst case scenario for the last month. It was a concept so awful I tried not to consider it a possibility at all.

It turns out that Ausi Mareisi could not leave her other job as her supervisor had disappeared. My worst case scenario was now my reality. Rescheduling was not possible as we had chairs, supplies, and meals provided by WorldVision. I wanted to laugh or to cry.

I wanted to cry. I wanted a magical ability to speak and hear Sesotho fluently for a day. I wanted to have been assigned an organization full of English speakers, like more of my PCV peers. Part of me even wanted to quit or at least to hide in my house and ignore this reality.

By I did not join Peace Corps to quit or hide in my house, I joined for challenges and new experiences; to fully immerse myself in another country. And, the reality is, nothing I have done thus far in Peace Corps would be new or challenging without the language difference.

So, I took a deep breath, or five. I apologized to the nearly twenty people present for speaking Sesotho poorly, and I started the workshop.

We worked within my language abilities until my supervisor and another leader in the organization arrived. I let them know that Ausi Mareisi would not make it and they promptly suggested I walk across the street to ask my friend to close his shop so he could help with translations when needed.

Lucky for me, Abuti Sama is in fact a good friend and he was willing to do just that. Unlike Ausi Mareisi, he had never seen the material we were covering let alone attended an entire training on it, so I really challenged him with my translation requests. Often times, while he tried to figure out a way to say the complex things I threw at him, I came up with easier explanations that I could manage in Sesotho. Then, I would use him to confirm what I said made sense.

In the seven-hour workshop, we did not get nearly as much completed as we had ambitiously planned, but we reached a unanimous conclusion to pursue an income generating project of egg-laying chickens and to hopefully reinvigorate the previously successful Vaseline project. Both of these meet with the outcome of the Needs Assessment Ausi Mareisi and I previously completed. The egg project has the benefit of also increasing food security in our communities, a second need brought forth in the Needs Assessment.

Despite wanting to both laugh and cry many times throughout the day, I cannot call it anything but a success. I managed to go far beyond the language abilities I recognize within myself, expressing hard topics in ways that everyone understood. We shared an incredibly camaraderie throughout the day, being playful with the language in ways I would not have understood or joined a few months ago. Bo-'M'e all agreed upon a project, which was completely unexpected. And, I had the excellent reminder that people want to see my work here succeed and are willing to stop everything to help.

It is pretty great to not only meet a challenge, but also be forced to recognize how many people are there to support me when I think I am going to have to deal with something on my own.

MCCC’s Egg Laying Chicken Project has been in development since March 2015. After many delays, MCCC and I were able to write a successful grant proposal for a VAST grant through Peace Corps. VAST grants are funded by PEPFAR to help with HIV-related work and OVC (Orphan and Vulnerable Children) care. It is due to MCCC’s work with OCVs that qualified us for the VAST grant. Otherwise, we would have applied for a PCPP [Peace Corps Partnership Program] grant and would have been asking for assistance in funding this grant proposal. I encourage you to consider supporting other PCPP projects.

Posts about this project include:

Workshop Woe, Busiest of Birthdays, Checking Out Chickens, A Day with Bo-’M’e, Chicken Coop Construction Day One, Day Two, Day, Three, Day Four, Day Five 

PC Skillz Intervention!

The coaches and certificate earning team members at our graduation.

For most of the last three weeks, my days have centered around studying ways to talk about relationships and HIV in Sesotho and playing with village youth.

 I have been doing a PC Skillz Intervention camp. PC Skillz is a joint venture between Peace Corps and Grassroot Soccer. It uses soccer-based games to teach life skills, positive living, and HIV/AIDS awareness. 

Although practices supposed to last for only an hour, most days I was playing with, talking to, or working with youth for 3-4 hours as practices usually took us between 90-120 minutes and the village kids would start arriving as much as two hours early and stay as long as possible to play with the "indestructible" One World Futbol. Add to that coach's meetings, making supplies, and translating pieces of the program with my brother and my entire universe has only been PC Skillz. 

The PC Skillz curriculum is a pretty fantastic experiential education curriculum. It reminded me of my favorite teaching moments in the US over the last decade.  

Over the eleven practices, we covered important topics like stigma and discrimination, abstinence, how HIV and ARVs affect the body, and how to avoid the riskiest behaviors for contracting HIV: unprotected sex, multiple partners, older partners, and combining sex and alcohol. Most practices we had 30-40 village youth from 9-19 despite having said the program was for 10-15 year old youth. In total, over 50 individuals attended at least one practice with more than half attended at least half of the practices. The Peace Corps Skillz program requires participants to attend at least eight practices to earn a certificate of completion, so only 18 received certificates. The others can come again next time we do the program to earn a coveted certificate. 

The coaching team after graduation:
Abuti Thabo, me, Abuti Ts'epo, and Ausi Mareisi

My co-coaches were absolutely amazing. While I was living, breathing, and sleeping PC Skillz, they were coaching with me a few hours a day and also working 6-9 hours in the fields! Every time they arrived, often just as we were starting practice, they were rushing back from the fields, but they always brought enthusiasm and a willingness to help. Prior to attending the PC Skillz training at the end of November, I worried about bringing my brother to the training as my counterpart. My brother is fantastic, but he is barely nineteen and still in high school. I worried that I was asking too much of him to coach his peers and younger teens in the village when talking about sensitive issues like HIV transmission, voluntary male medical circumcision, and sex. He was absolutely incredible though, both as my Sesotho back up-he seemed to know when to help and when to let me work out what I needed to say-and as a coach in his right. 

The youth were amazing too. Sometimes I wondered how much of the message was getting through between my poorly accented Sesotho and their reticence to speak up during Q&A and discussions. But at our graduation ceremony yesterday, it was obvious they knew their stuff. 

"Coach" Bolokang

For the graduation, in addition to bestowing certificates and taking over 100 photos (no really...the kids love having their picture taken, over and over again!), we ran through one of our earlier practices with some of the participants acting as coaches. When asked by their peers, the participants had every single answer they had hesitated to give over the last few weeks. It was wonderful!  

Coach Thabo telling a "Coach's Story."

I think my favorite thing about this particular intervention is that it really helped me get to know the youth in the village-their names, their personalities, etc. And it helped them get to know me and my personality, seeing me as a friend and mentor instead of just the smiling American who always says hello! 

Youthful Enthusiasm

Many times over the last decade or so, when nothing else has been going right, the fact that I work with young people has provided joy during what would otherwise have been very challenging moments.

The past week has definitely fallen into that category.

Coming off two weeks of relaxing village life without heading to work because of the holidays, I had been approaching this week with both excitement and a bit of trepidation. In addition to restarting my thrice weekly meetings with Bo-'M'e who want to start a knitting business, I was starting a three-week youth program to fill the gap between holidays and the start of school at the end of January. This meant I was going to be the busiest I have been dunce moving to the village.

And, I was.

Everyday, I got up with the sun (or earlier as I could hear my brothers getting the cows hooked up to the wagon to go work in the fields well before dawn.). I would squeeze in a workout and breakfast before spending an hour or two prepping for the day before leaving for work at 9:30.

The plan from there was to meet with Bo-'M'e and my counterpart from 10-1, eat lunch and set up for the youth, then work with them from 2-4, meet with the folks who are co-leading the youth activities with me, then head home with time to cook dinner before the sun sets a bit after seven.

Things do not go according to plan.

Instead, on Monday, I found myself sitting alone at work from 10-2, at which point my brother Thabo arrived to start our youth programs. No one else arrived until around three.

That night my counterpart and I agreed to meet at 10 the next morning, so there I sat at 10. And there I remained, alone at 12:30 when I returned home to finish some prep for the afternoon.

Wednesday, I headed to work, grumbling internally and wondering if anyone would allow up for our morning meeting. The answer was almost no, although one 'M'e arrived around noon and knit with me until I needed to prep for the youth.

Thursday, I didn't have any meetings planned for the morning, but my counterpart and I agreed to meet at 12:30 to finish planning the youth programs for that day. I arrived on time and began getting nervous that she would not arrive when 1:15 rolled around. Thankfully this time her phone was on and she assured me she would be arriving. With Thabo out of town, I did not want to do the youth programming without a Sesotho counterpart as we are doing everything in Sesotho and I have my limitations.

I asked about the Friday meeting and was assured that people would show up on time. So Friday morning I headed to work, where I sat alone for nearly two hours before three people finally arrived.

Obviously, I spent a lot of time frustratedly knitting and greeting people as they passed, trying not to show my annoyance when asked why I was sitting all alone. In reality, there were very good reasons that most of the women did not make appearances. Monday, many of them had to attend a meeting at the fields with our chief and the Ministry of Agriculture. During this meeting, it was decided that everyone needed to work in the fields in the mornings while the weather was dry because the Ministry of Agriculture had given them some soil treatments that needed to be tilled into the rows between the crops.

What actually bothered me about it was that no one told me this was happening and would impact or meetings. Everyone simply assumed someone else had filled me in. Thus, I spent over 11 hours sitting by myself when I could have been getting things done at home.

If I had not been for the afternoon youth programming and my Saturday teen support group, I probably would have wanted to scream or at least pull out my hair.

Instead, I spent my afternoons doing Grassroot Soccer's PC Skillz program with teens from my community. We have two more weeks of the program so I will wait until it is completed to say too much about it.

After working mostly with adults since my arrival, it is great to be working with teens again. Whether goofing off with them before and after the program or watching their facial expressions when we tell them something surprising during the program, I cannot help but be happy after spending time with them.

With over a decade of similar programming experience in the States, this program is providing some really unique challenges too. What is normally second nature to me-like rephrasing questions when people are confused-suddenly requires me to stop and think because I don't always have the Sesotho vocabulary to just go with it. Even though I have 2-3 fellow coaches at each practice, all native Sesotho speakers, I am trying to communicate effectively for myself and it isn't always easy.

It's fascinating to have something that is normally so easy for me suddenly become difficult. I am really enjoying the challenge in it. And, I think everyone else is enjoying my unintentional happy dance when I remember new vocabulary!