The power outages have been daily occurrences, 8-hours at a time at random intervals, so I do apologize once again.  Evidently, we rely on hydroelectric power from dams in Ghana and they are experiencing low water flows this season, so Togo is economising with regular blackouts or brownouts, whatever they call it.

SO, what have I been up to these past several months?

In August, I participated in Camp UNITE, which is an annual series of week-long camps for girls, boys, and young apprentice girls (seamstresses and hairdressers), respectively.  Apprentices are a very vulnerable group because they have usually left school before finishing even middle school or primary school so don't even benefit from some of the health education that comes in the higher grades, and are financially often dependent on men who are not their husbands (sometimes their patrons/bosses), and thus highly susceptible to getting HIV or other STDs.  I was a counselor/facilitator for the apprentice camp, where we taught about self confidence, self respect, good communication skills, teambuilding, as well as about sexual harrassment, human rights, family planning, HIV/AIDS & STDs, nutrition, child trafficking, and how to do basic budgeting and planning for your future, among other things. 

It was a very rewarding and enlightening experience, especially watching how some of the girls seemed to really blossom and to truly 'get it', that they have choices and dreams and the right to see them through. It helped me see every girl after that as someone with potential rather than simply just someone whose life and problems I could never fully understand.  Hard to explain, but it was good!  Grandma, Aunties, Bird, did you ever get my letters?  Or Jane's, for that matter?  Grandma, I know I told you all about that Camp in my letter...

Sexual Harassment is rampant rampant rampant, yet it is not recognized as such.  Boys and men (and professors) just see it as their right to try; and girls just seem to see themselves as some sort of cheap commodity.  They are not offended by the groping and the propositions; they just accept it as the way it is.  In the bush especially, kids are in school, sometimes still in middle school, often into their 20s -- For older boys, the younger girls coming in are like fresh fruit on their own personal tree, ripe for the picking and theirs to take, essentially free, at their leisure.  Sex and love are not separate issues, and I would go so far as to say that "love" MEANS "sex", and does not at all carry the same connotations (of commitment and mutual respect and admiration) as it does in our culture.  Sex here, too, is a whole different ballgame.  It's a bargaining tool, a thing to be traded for goods and not regarded necessarily as sacred or special, and yet everything is done, all the wheelings and dealings, are done in secrecy.  Relationships among non-married people are not out in the open -- yet everyone knows --, and the relationship is not a relationship until the girl accepts to sleep with the boy.  She does not have the "security" of a boyfriend nor potential husband, unless she sleeps with him.  Meanwhile, he plies her with promises of pagne cloth, money, help with school fees, food, other gifts, marriage.  It is an insidious form of prostitution.  Perhaps it is a collective defense mechanism, a way to deal with chronic poverty, and to get what you think you need without having to "pay" for it.  Sex is an easy thing to trade if you don't regard it as linked to your sense of self.  For boys or for girls.

Apathy is the word I use to describe parental involvement in their children's lives.  It's as if they bring their kids into the world, nourish them to a certain age, provide some financial support and then essentially wash their hands of the situation.  (Children who die in infancy, btw, or even older kids, do not receive funeral services.  It's like they weren't there to begin with.)  I was baffled by the attitude of a mother last September, for just one example, whose daughter was refusing to return to school.  She is a smart girl, more with it than many of her peers, and I had in fact worked with her as a Red Cross-trained peer educator, and she was articulate and unafraid of public speaking (rare in girls here!).  She wouldn't really respond when I'd push for a reason, but when I talked to her mom who sells rice in the street, she was just like, shrugging, Oh I don't know, as if it was none of her concern.  Then, almost absently, and with no feeling, says, Maybe she's pregnant.   This kid with so much potential, and obvious ambition, and her mom is so blasé about her dropping out of school, perhaps her only chance out of poverty!  Sure enough, in the end she was pregnant, hadn't yet admitted it to anyone but her boyfriend (another bright peer educator trained by the previous PCV), and had yet to even go get examined.  Luckily, he's acknowledging the pregnancy, I took her myself to the dispensaire to get started on pre-natal stuff, and they are supposedly going to make a go of it.  Of course, he's still in middle school himself.  Yes, these are two kids with all the information, and still weren't protecting themselves -- proof that change is a long long process -- but that is a whole other discussion. 

But, anyway, this apathy thing :  There is very little parental guidance.  They seem to have no authority over their children, and don't attempt to.  Everyone knows all this sex stuff goes down at night, as boys and girls roam around 'visiting', and that in addition it means homework isn't being done, but the parents claim to have no way of preventing it, that it's up to the kids to do what they're gonna do.  As it has since been explained to me, this apathy stems from the fact that many parents don't support their children financially; as the kids get older, they are expected to fend for themselves more and more, find their own means to pay school fees, etc. -- and thus the parents don't feel they have any moral authority over these children they are barely supporting.  How can you give parental guidance and restrictions when you're not even able to give parental support?  Again, this seems like more of the same collective defense mechanism in the face of poverty:  I cannot invest too much in you emotionally, cuz you may not make it and I wouldn't be able to deal if I cared too much. 

This need to fend for themselves of course pushes girls into the sex trade thing, since girls are hard pressed to find other ways to make money.  Some parents actually encourage their daughters to give in to older men who seem to have some financial means, especially if they think it may lead to marriage.  I've been told, too, that some husbands expect their wives to supplement the family income by selling herself, whether she wants to or not (this from a courageous HIV+ woman who toured with us on AIDS Ride, and who explained how she never let her husband talk her into it and finally left him, and walked straight into the arms of a second husband, who kept his positive HIV status a secret for fear she wouldn't marry him.  She only discovered her new status once their newborn fell ill and died of AIDS). 

For all these reasons, the "Abstinence" party line is just a ridiculous agenda, in the face of these current cultural norms.  Those norms will have to change in order for abstinence-until-marriage to make any sense at all -- and Fidelity --, and I can't imagine how those norms will change anytime soon when poverty is unlikely to be eradicated anytime soon.  Condoms Condoms Condoms, man, it's the only chance.  As people are becoming more and more convinced about the existence and high prevalence of HIV, I think condoms will be coming into their own sooner than the other prevention methods -- like they did in the States --, especially when we are pointing out that for a measly 25 francs (the price of a calabash of tchouk, the local millet beer), you can buy a condom that protects against not only HIV and other STDs, but also unwanted pregnancy...

In early September, I observed a camp for young mothers -- again, often girls who were forced to leave school due to pregnancy.  So, the focus was on self confidence and communication skills, but also on child nutrition and the fact that they still have a future and in fact owe it to their kids to finish school or their apprenticeship, and to not give up on themselves.  Girls get kicked out of school or their apprenticeships (that they've paid to be in, btw!) once they get pregnant, and are often shunned by their peers -- the baby daddy of course can just deny the pregnancy and even if he does claim it, they don't kick him out of school.  The girls are shamed and think they are essentially spoiled goods, and often think that that's it for them and that they are now resigned to a life without an education and with no other prospects other than to hopefully find a man to take care of them --- which of course opens them up to all sorts of vulnerability.  They often don't know that they have the right to an education or to finish their apprenticeship, regardless.  Me and another PCV are hoping to carry the torch and find funding to organize this camp again next year.

As I wrote to Anna a couple months ago, more and more it is so apparent that two years is not enough time to even scratch a centimeter of the surface that I personally feel is needed to understand the culture enough to affect any sort of behaviour and attitude change.  The thing I get the most demoralized about is the attitude toward women, the cause of all the moral problems in my community, according to even the most enlightened of my collaborators, and according even to the women, because they are all so enmired in the bullshit, they believe it all as some inherent truth.  According to the large majority, at least in the rural areas:  Women here are naturally dishonest, naturally unfaithful if they are left to themselves, and it is their fault that they give in to the advances of men, their professors, their patrons, or whoever else might offer them money or grades or goods or marriage or just plain love in exchange for a sexual relationship.  It is their fault they are having sex too young, quitting school, getting pregnant without a partner who will take responsibility for it.  It is their fault HIV is more prevalent among women.  I am not exaggerating.  It ALWAYS goes back to the girls' failure to control herself or the situation.  Yet, these same people admit that girls are not raised in this culture to speak up or have confidence or self esteem, or to value a sense of self over the promise of some gift.  Men admit they are the dominant ones, but they inexplicably think these girls should be able to take charge of a sexual or other relationship with men.  It is mind boggling and frustrating, and I have thrown cultural sensitivity out the window.  I tell them now that they are flat out wrong, and I point out their own contradictory statements.  I have gotten in so many heated arguments with my good guy friends over this very issue, and I know it's all for nothing.  They were born boys and no matter how many different ways I try to make them see their fucked up logic, they absolutely cannot see how girls are treated as lesser beings, nor how that influences every fucking thing that happens in their lives.  To them, it's not how women are regarded and treated that causes problems, it's just how women are -- "dishonest, unfaithful, weak".  Nothing I say is going to change how women are inherently.  After all, if women weren't this way, they wouldn't regard them as that way, obviously.  Obviously.

I should note, btw, that it's a problem with African women only; "nous les noirs", "us black people" is a common complaint, which is a whole 'nother issue -- this country suffers I've decided from a severe inferiority complex, on an individual to a national level.  "C'est comme ca en Afrique", that's just how it is in Africa.  They have been convinced, over the decades of colonialism and the decades of foreign aid, that they cannot figure any of it out on their own, that they are inherently less intelligent and less moral beings than "the whites."  On the flip side, they often also think that we are trying to kill them, or at least suppress them.  It never ceases to amaze me how many people answer TRUE to the statement that AIDS is a disease sent over by the whites to kill Africans, or suppress their reproduction.  They say that AIDS stands for (from the French, SIDA) "Integrated System to Discourage the Amourous").  Or that we put HIV in the condoms and that's why we promote them so heavily.  It's fun to watch their faces when I point out the illogical reasoning behind that:  Is AIDS only in Africa?  If we wanted to kill you, aren't their easier, faster ways to do it?  Like guns, bombs?

In the course of that week, hearing different groups ask their questions and reveal bizarre myths and conspiracy theories in such a condensed period of time, it became clear what is going on:  By focusing on blood and mother-to-child transmission modes, and kicking sexual transmission to the background, they can avoid having to take personal responsibility for getting or transmitting the disease.  It also allows them to not change their behaviour.  Conspiracy theories about how it got to Africa puts the blame elsewhere as well.  To the inevitable question about when, how and where AIDS first appeared (if not from Europe or the U.S.), we would kick it back with "Does it matter?"  We don't know for certain, but we also don't know where malaria and tuberculosis came from. What we DO know is how to prevent it, so stop with the evasion tactics; stop waiting for a cure (and suspecting we have one but are hiding it from you); stop coming up with all these crazy impossible scenarios of how someone could slip it to you; and start taking your own life in your hands.  Think about what you need to do to protect yourself, your wife, your husband, your son, your daughter.  Do it.  Share the message.