Feelings made of Jade

“We tested 147 people in Block B (the name of my community, yeah I know the place is so ghetto that the name of my village is called Block B) last month and 78 test results were HIV positive.”

-Chief HIV tester and counselor at one of my village’s nonprofit organizations

53 percent of the people that came into that particular center last month tested positive for HIV. The month before that 46 percent of people that came for HIV testing were found to be HIV positive. The official HIV prevalence of our municipality is 38 percent. But as you can see things in my village may be a bit direr. And with the new round of world wide funding cuts due to the global recession a lot of people are left wondering if the situation is going to get better or worse. I can only imagine what it could feel like to find out that you have HIV, one of the most feared and stigmatized diseases in the world. I remember awhile back when a 17 year old girl came to our home based care center. She had told us that she had recently tested positive for HIV and had not received any counseling after her positive test. It is standard procedure that you are counseled and talked to extensively after you take a HIV test. But this time she told us that after the test they told her to go home. No talk, no feelings of comfort, just to go home in darkness. We then had one of our workers counsel her. She is doing better and continuing her schooling while still talking to several workers at my organization. It makes me think about my own life. What was I doing when I was 17? I was learning how to drive, graduating from high school, going to Prom, and was soon to be attending university to begin a promising chapter of my life. Fairly stark differences compared to that 17 year old girl who had just tested positive for HIV, received no support, was never taught English (the medium of instruction is English in the schools, yet only a small amount of learners speak English) and now has become a living statistic in a village where government and service providers are consistently failing their people.

Many activities and programs I have helped start and overseen are very small scale achievements in relation to the larger picture. As we slowly come to the conclusion that individual Peace Corps Volunteers don’t have the ability to save the world, I suppose you could ask what I could really achieve in this situation. It would be natural for you to think that I was jaded at this point. I have only been here for 16 months. May be a long time but also in the grand scheme of things it really is not. You think I’m jaded? Imagine the chief HIV tester that spoke in the above quote. She’s been doing this for 5 years. I can only imagine how jaded she might feel. She has seen people come and go. She has tried to counsel and console people that have been infected. Imagine how she feels to see and live the challenges as long as she has with little evidence that things are getting better. There have been people working and living here a lot longer than I have, imagine what it’s like to show up to work every day for years and in the grand scheme of things achieve little progress, see people die all the time and all those things. So when I think about being jaded. I wonder myself, people come here to do development work and become jaded, but once again, just imagine how jaded the people here must feel.

I suppose we could call it quits. I could just exclaim, “Oh my god! I’m jaded, I’m rolling out.” But fortunately it doesn’t work like that. Lucky for some, I’m not jaded or perhaps I’m too dumb to know the difference between good and bad situations and situations that I should be jaded about. Now is not the time to be jaded, but now is the time to get people motivated and excited about things as hard as that sounds. It’s one thing to tell people to get motivated and get excited. But one must realize in order to do this people must get excited and motivated about something.

I have submitted a grant proposal focused on scaling up HIV/AIDS education outreach and support for those with HIV/AIDS. All stakeholders and partner organizations would develop a uniform HIV/AIDS curriculum that would become the standard of education in the area. It is important that everyone teaches the same correct information so that people are not confused as to what is the truth. The program would increase the number of HIV/AIDS education volunteers and train them to become efficient killing machines and/or HIV/AIDS educators. We are developing a strategy that would spread out the new volunteers and the existing volunteers in different areas that would help concentrate education efforts and ensure that more people received comprehensive HIV/AIDS education. These would focus on education in schools and a large amount of small focus groups. The main target group would be youth ages 15-24. Giving people knowledge would allow people to make more informed decisions. Also included in the program would be support groups. This would allow people infected and affected by HIV/AIDS to speak openly about their experiences with other members of the group. This in the long run could help break the silence and stigma of HIV/AIDS in the area simply by having people have open and honest discussions about the disease and their experiences. The groups would also be taught income generating skills and business skills so they would be able to have skills that would help them succeed. In the end though, this program would force different organizations and people to work together. By having multiple organizations in the area help out and offer input it would allow more dialogue between organizations.

It’s true that one person cannot change anything. A Peace Corps Volunteer like me on my own cannot save the world. But I don’t intend to. But the work that people can collectively do together may possibly be able to do something. Talking about this project, no matter how simple we may think it is, has gotten plenty of people excited about it. And hopefully it will pan out and perhaps give some semblance of hope and evidence that it is getting better.