One Year In

ONE YEAR IN

            We left home on September 11, 2012. It has been a year. I am not the most reflective guy on the planet, therefore it is not surprising that I have spent little time looking back on my decision to leave New Hampshire and join the Peace Corps. Still, I can say this: for me, it’s been great. So what is so wonderful about what we have been doing?

            Somehow I thought that my Peace Corps service would be an extension of the community work I had performed over the years in New Hampshire. That is, I might help NGOs and community groups to thrive. But then we got placed in a community of 6000 people, of which 2200 or so board at a senior secondary school. There is no local supermarket or newspaper or radio station. Most adults here either tend livestock or work for government offices or are unemployed. There are more donkeys than cars in Goodhope. There is not a lot of “capacity”, as NGO folks might phrase it. But despite this description of our rural outpost, Goodhope is far from bucolic. And that gets to the challenge we have been asked to address.

            The biggest health issue here, as in all of Botswana, is HIV. At last count, Botswana had the second highest rate of infection in the world. The biggest social issues here - alcohol abuse and non-monogamous sexual relationships (known as multiple concurrent partners or MCPs) – result in risky behavior that leads to the biggest health issue. Botswana does very well on the health services delivery side of the HIV epidemic: free testing, free anti-retroviral drugs and free mother-to-child transmission prevention regimens are all readily available.  Condom use is widely encouraged. People are not dying from AIDS in anything close to the numbers of the 1990s. But still HIV is infecting too many people, and all of the medical interventions in the world cannot prevent that from happening. It took ten years and billions of aid dollars from the United States, the United Nations, the Gates Foundation and others to figure this out. That is why our mission here is deceptively simple: change people’s behavior so that they do not get HIV/AIDS.

            We work on something called life skills. It is as amorphous as it sounds. It aims to change people’s habits profoundly so that they do not end up getting infected with HIV. Part of it is as easy as getting people to use condoms correctly and consistently. Part of it is to get adolescents to delay the start of sexual encounters and to delay bearing children. Part of it is to get adults to recognize that serial monogamy is better all around than having MCPs. And part of it is to make people aware that alcohol and drug use can lead to bad decisions about sexual activities.

            All of us are assigned to a school. We are there to make sure that the life skills curriculum gets implemented and taught to all students in all grades. One period a week is devoted to teaching life skills: self-awareness, decision-making, goal setting, reduction of risky behavior, and HIV prevention methods. Stephanie and I teach or co-teach some of those classes in our respective schools. Sometimes we show excellent short “STEPS” films designed for southern Africa audiences and funded by the Soros Foundation, Scandinavian foreign aid and others. Sometimes we lead role-playing exercises, allowing students to ham it up while infusing valuable lessons. We also try to train fellow teachers at our schools to use different teaching methods, since life skills is best taught neither by rote memorization nor by stern lectures backed up by corporal punishment. And we organize overnight camps to teach these skills in depth to select groups of girls (and sometimes boys).

These Form 1 students know the formula for the total number of degrees of the interior angles of a polygon. Do you?

Guidance and counseling class. We are talking about a STEPS film I just showed on the library TV.

            Then there is the softer side of life skills education. Getting students involved in sports and other healthy outlets decreases the chance that they will engage in risky behavior. Teaching math where a school is short a teacher (as in my case) increases the chance that a cohort of students will pass the exams required to further their education and thereby decreases the chance they will become unemployed adults prone to engage in risky behavior. Training teachers or coaches or judges in life skills increases the chance that they will pass on their knowledge to the many more people they instruct in their work.

            Finally, we model good life skills every day, and that also means a lot. In training, we learned the particular importance of living our life stories. The two of us are unusual here for two reasons: we are a long-term married couple and we have no MCPs on the side. Too many leaders in the community, including some teachers, cannot say that. We also don’t frequent the bars, spots that too often encourage illicit sexual activity. We put in a full day's work. We burn calories by walking miles every day to and from work and community offices. When I run around the village for exercise, you can be sure that my gray hair and white skin stand out. It is quite a novelty, and I can say with assurance that no other 60 year old runs in Goodhope. In fact, the average life expectancy here is only 55 or so.

            In short, I never thought that I would be doing all of this. While I still have some time to help out organizations with grant writing and fund raising, it is not close to what I spend most of my day doing. They say you learn a lot about yourself in Peace Corps. So far, I have learned that I can teach and coach, and that I can even talk pretty explicitly about sex without blushing. I have also learned that I can be patient in a society that is certainly not fast paced. There’s even more that I have learned, but I am not in a hurry to report everything now. I will save it for later posts.