This post is probably not appropriate for those younger readers I hear read my blog. But I don't really believe in censorship, so feel free to read on anyway.
This
past Saturday, I went to tutor English at the orphanage and then go to the
director Jill’s house for lunch and conversation, as per usual. The current
village news is that there is a house somewhere in the village where two women
are basically prostituting themselves out to the truck drivers and road workers
who come through the village as they dynamite and smooth out the road. One of
these women is known to have HIV, and the other might. They both have husbands
with jobs, so it’s not like they desperately need the money. Uhhhh, is this for real? I thought. Unfortunarely, yes.
Jill then told me
about how last year when an American nurse came to visit, she went to talk to a
group of women, I think in some kind of support group, to explain how HIV
testing worked. Not wanting to waste test kits, she wanted to demonstrate on a
woman who was more likely to have HIV. She asked people to stand up who
currently have three or more sexual partners. Almost all the women stood up.
No, no, she said to the woman translating. You must have translated wrong. Not
anyone who has had three or more partners in her lifetime; anyone who currently has three or more partners. Nope,
no translation error. Almost all the women in the room did, in fact, admit to currently
have three or more sexual partners. No wonder HIV continues to spread like
wildfire. In an old Basotho saying, men are like pumpkins, spreading their
vines all over, and women are like cabbages, just sitting in place. But it
looks like in reality, both men and women are being quite pumpkin-like.
To give another
example of the problems of MCP (multiple concurrent partners), sometimes when I’m
in a hitch with a man, he will ask me if I have a boyfriend or husband. Even if
I say yes, in a vain attempt to stop them hitting on me by pretending I’m
already “claimed” (which I also hate because it dismisses a woman’s authority
to say no without excuses), they tell me that they want to be my second
boyfriend. If I say that my pretend husband is American, they say I need a
Mosotho boyfriend as well. Everyone seems to have a few people on the side, as “snacks”
they say, to go alongside the main course. Since jobs are so scarce, oftentimes
people have to move away from their families when they get a job, and that’s a
lot of the reason why people have multiple partners. It’s just so normalized at
this point.
During training and
from talking to people since then, I have also learned that alternatives to
actual intercourse (I’ll let you use your imagination here) are not really a
thing here. Other than rumors of herd boys having sex with their sheep,
watermelons, and holes in the ground, there’s not really a popular alternative
in this culture. This could also be why the incidence of rape is also so high
here.
At almost every
public place, there are free condoms up for grabs to help curb the spread of
HIV, but obviously just throwing condoms at people isn’t stopping all the unsafe
sex and having tons of partners. They’re there, but it’s still somewhat weird
to use them, and not everyone knows how. This is why I’m doing a condom
demonstration for my Form Cs this week. An old campaign to help stop HIV goes
off the easy-to-remember acronym ABC: Abstain, Be faithful, and Condomize to
prevent the spread of STIs and HIV. Probably every kid in my Form C life skills
class already knew what ABC stands for, but in practice these are not being
practiced by the majority of adults here (and teens, if my Form A ausi’s
pregnancy is any indication). It’s just going to take some time to change the
perceptions about casual, unprotected sex and multiple concurrent partners
before we see the HIV rate decrease in this region.
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