HIV Course

About three weeks ago I ran a training course on HIV/AIDS for the drop-in centre carers I am working with, and I have been delaying writing about it. It was the first time that I have actually been able to do HIV outreach since arriving here almost twenty months ago (who’s counting?), despite the job description. I have been delaying writing about it because I am still processing a bundle of ambivalent feelings about it.

Halfway through the course I was quite pleased with its progress. In the last hour or so I was incredibly frustrated. Neither of these moments captures everything that was important about the training, but they are revealing.

The first moment, too, is revealing. Both shockingly and fortuitously, turnout for the course was about half of what it has been for most of the other trainings I’ve been running for the drop-in centres. I’m still not sure why. Reluctance to discuss the topic? Feelings of being already informed enough? Bad timing? Financial constraints? No one did their homework from the last course? This did, however, decrease the class sizes--about fifteen people each--to a more reasonable number, making the planned activities much easier to run.

Halfway through, all of the excellent sessions I had adapted from the Peace Corps Life Skills Manual and the Planned Parenthood Association of South Africa Life Skills manual were going more or less perfectly--the sessions were proceeding as described, the learners were engaged, and people appeared to be learning something. The condom demonstrations in particular were, I hoped, helpful and entertaining.

Then came the end, the last few hours of the course when I couldn't wrench a review answer from anyone with a pair of pliers. Some people, I knew, hadn't been there for the first day, and others, I knew, were not as engaged as the majority. But I was still completely shocked at how little of the immune system material, which was accompanied by fun games and drawings, had been absorbed when we began to talk about treatment. How can anyone help someone adhere to a treatment plan or a schedule of clinic visits if they don't understand why? Failure. The quiz results were not promising, either.

And a final frustration: since then, I have been doing site visits to the centres (more on those later), and I have not yet seen one lesson plan for how they plan on teaching the course material to their OVCs. We spent about three hours that week going over how to write lesson plans, and part of their homework was to write five. The best we had was someone saying, "Oh, the carers gave a health talk one day, but we didn't write anything down." I am incredibly disappointed that after three days of material presented in an engaging, hands-on manner, no one so far has adopted any of it for their centres. Why even attend the course?

Sensing (and probably sharing, though she's more used to it) my disappointment, my counterpart has been telling me in a mix of Tsonga and English, "All we can do is try." This is also a mantra of preparing Peace Corps trainings for volunteers: we can make the material available, and it's up to the learners to use it.