Sex health

As anyone who has ever been quoted in the press knows, there is often some slippage between what one actually said and what makes it into print. When my university issued a press release about my Fulbright, the sub-title indicated that I was to study "sex health issues in urban Senegal." This description is not entirely wrong, but not entirely apt either.

In any event, this week I attended a training for young women (20-25) who will hopefully become peer educators and then lead a year long empowerment/sex ed program for adolescent girls in their neighborhoods. In Senegal (and throughout francophonie) these kinds of programs are given the amazingly vague title "Education in Family Life" or Education a la Vie Familiale. The overarching goals of the program are to reduce the rates of HIV and sexually transmitted infections in the Dakar suburbs (read unplanned neighborhoods/shantytowns here) and to reduce the risks of HIV and STIs for the girls who participate in the program. Other objectives include reducing teen pregnancy, teen marriage, and "forced" marriages.

One of the tricks of the program is that with a peer education model, the facilitators are supposed to have the same social background as the participants, which in this case means girls 13-20 from very poor neighborhoods who have never been to school or who have very little schooling at all. The dilemma--how do you transform timid, barely literate young women into dynamic leaders who will become community organizers on reproductive health issues and role-models for their peers?

The program in question is now entering its 14th year, so they must be doing something right. The first three-days of training were also an audition. The supervisors will select two or three girls from the group of five trainees and they will become the group leaders. It only took a few hours to see which of the young women seem to have the requisite sass and poise to pull off the job of peer educator. One young woman, who could barely raise her voice to an audible level when she was called on to speak, looked horrified during a small group exercise when I suggested that teaching about contraception might be part of the program. "But that would mean talking about pre-marital sex!" was the jist of her objection. Yes indeed, sex and contraception are taboo subjects, but how does one talk to girls about teen pregnancy without talking about sex and contraception? (Unless of course we want to promote abstinence, because we know how well that works.)

Perhaps the best part was that the trainers decided to throw me in with the other women and treat me like a student, which means I got about 16 hours of interactive discussions and small group work in Wolof. (Believe me, I wrote down a LOT of new vocabulary to learn). The other trainees took my presence in stride and since I am getting to know them at the very beginning, I don't think I will have any problems shadowing them for the rest of the year. I have a pretty good guess about who the supervisors will pick, and over the next six weeks I will follow their progress as they head back to the neighborhoods to recruit girls for their groups.

Is this social change in action? Hard to say yet, but the whole project is a fascinating endeavor and I will be fascinated to watch these newly-minted peer educators lead discussions on topics like "What is love" and "Who owns my body?" in the months to come.