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Our clever, thoughtful and loving children sent off a care package which arrived Friday and contained, in addition to speakers which can play my iPod (Offenbach and the Dixie Chix – more similarities than you might at first have thought), a solar shower, which we've hung in the nifty tiled curtained shower area the previous volunteers and one of the young men on the homestead had built. Continuing the X-rated trend in this blog, the shower is pictured, in use! This was, unfortunately, one of the rare cool and cloudy days, so my shower was brief.

We administered to two 5^th and 6^th grades and to an 8^th and an 11^th grade class (250 students, total) a 32 question Family Health International survey of the students' knowledge of how NIV is transmitted, whether they know people who are infected (they do, but may not know it – 31% of the adults in this country are HIV+!), how they feel towards people they learn are infected, and to whom they turn for information about HIV. The idea is to see what is needed and who the persuaders are. Then we returned to each of the 6 classes and told them what the survey showed, focusing on correcting erroneous understandings and trying to persuade them to be more accepting of those known to be infected, because apparently secrecy and shame are major obstacles to treatment. We ended up team-teaching most of these feed-back sessions, which generally went really well; we both felt more comfortable with the other to help out in a strange classroom, and I like to think we modeled a respectful male/female sharing relationship.

Here is Katherine explaining the survey results, with, behind her on the board, a list of the four substances that can transmit HIV; you try explaining to a class of 6^th graders, boys and girls aged 11 to 16, what semen and vaginal fluid are. (Why is it that the teacher whose classroom we've taken over, and just as often the school principal, always seems to enter the classroom just as I'm about to try to explain to the students what semen is?) This is one of the less crowded classrooms; the 5^th grade fits 3 of the little ones behind benches about that size. The girls all have extremely close-cropped hair, and sometimes shaved heads, so at this age I really can't tell the difference; it is helpful that the girls all wear skirts, even when on cold days they wear pants underneath the skirts.

Then we went outside to do an activity to make our points memorable. The PC used this approach of learning through activities this winter in training us, and I thought it worked well; I despair of achieving the needed behavioral change through lectures (see below). The class is in the courtyard, under the purple flowers of the jacaranda tree. To illustrate that people are easily fooled by appearances so you can't tell whether someone has HIV just by looking at them (so if you're not going to abstain, you better wear a condom; yup, we're telling that to 11 year olds – and none too early for some, from what I can tell), each line of students passes an apple behind their backs, and the other line facing them tries to guess who has the apple. When we did this in training, I watched KUF in the opposite line because I knew I could tell when she was trying to hide that the apple had been passed to her – she's the one who, many years ago playing Clue with friends, was randomly selected as the murderer, the only one allowed to lie, and she had to withdraw and we re-started the game because she is congenitally unable to lie, even in playing a parlor game with friends. I successfully identified the apple that way in training, but none of the kids in the 2 classes we did this activity with guessed right, which we think nicely made our point that you can't tell from appearances who is HIV+.

I received quite a few really helpful, thoughtful and remarkably learned responses to my plea for Biblical references for my school “ministry.” I chose the gospel of Mark (!) passage on Jesus and the leper, and then the “Suffer the little children to come unto me” passage from Matthew. I thought my presentation out pretty carefully, because I needed to try to hit an audience of boys and girls aged 6 to 14 with widely varied English comprehension, and I was treading a fine line on how free I felt to tell these kids exactly what God wants from them; the other teachers are very emphatic in telling the students what God wants, but I'm less sure of myself here. I gave my presentation to KUF the night before, and she was enthused, but the unexpected is always the most predictable outcome for me on this continent, and my “ministering” did not go especially well. It was a slightly windy day, blowing towards me, and I began with the students after they had been standing, praying and singing, for 15 minutes. (They line up, shorter to taller, under a corrugated metal roof, at 7:30 for assembly each morning.) I did not hold for very long the attention of the younger grades, whose English and attention spans were limited and, as the younger ones right in front of me started to whisper and fidget in their places, I started to lose some of the older, as well. They are used to a more declamatory, less explicating “Opening Statement” style than I have. I did not get much response from the other teachers, only about 1/2 of whom attended; the one comment was that a bi-lingual pun I tried to make with my name (Sipho Tsabedze = gift and blessing) was incomprehensible, and ended up sounding as if I was praying for myself. Oh, well. I've got lots of good additional material. I'll listen to the other teachers, and try to see what works. Thanks for your responses to my plea. Hope I'm asked to share again.