Today was the last day of coaches training at the Football for Hope Center in Khayelitsha. It really turned out to be a great experience as we were confronted with so many tough issues surrounding HIV and attempting to prevent it in a place like this. I have so many thoughts from the week.
The thought or summation or idea that keeps coming back to me this week is the way in which AIDS feeds off so many inequalities and injustices. Gender inequality is the most apparent. That is the incredible degree to which girls are less educated, 100% financially dependent, completely socially subservient, and devoid of voice presents quite a difficult challenge to prevention.
Poverty presents a unique challenge. You see HIV/AIDS is not urgent. It takes years to really set in, even without treatment. Hunger is urgent. Shelter is now. Safety is now. For a woman, having a man to provide for her 7 children in paramount. AIDS is the last thing on so many of these people's minds. If people don't have anything to live for why would they care about HIV?
Racial inequality destroys prevention efforts. It does so by destroying leadership. South Africa existed for such an incredibly long time under Apartheid, recial inequality that makes segregation seem lame. African people down here grew up with no vote, no voice, no social mobility. No one understands that they can make a difference. The African community is devoid of initiative, motivation, hope, dreams, confidence, etc. There is no leadership, not in townships like Khayelitsha. So when an organization like GRS goes to get people from the community to train them and pay them to implement and cook-book, ready-made AIDS prevention curriculum, they can't find anyone, not many. The last two days the trainees have been doing "teach-backs" where they basically practice presenting a lesson to their peers for evaluation and training purposes. Quite honestly these two days have been pretty discouraging because although it seems they have received excellent training, very few (maybe 5 out of 20) seem to have been able to succesfully present the curriculum. I am not talking about being great, dynamic teachers, I am merely talking about tying together ideas in a coherent way to deliver a basic message about HIV/AIDS. These trainees are awesome. They are great people. Truly. They just have incredibly low confidence, self-esteem, and they one by one got up to practice talking in front of a group struggled. It was tough to watch.
I don't want to sound too tough on these guys. I think they will get there and GRS continues to work with them and develop them. They will go with experienced coaches for a while to sort of learn the methods in more of an apprenticeship fashion. But the repercussions of inequality and repression are so apparent.
While all that inequality is depressing in a lot of ways, and the challenges facing AIDS continue to seem overbearing and impossible. However, I really noticed something today that was exciting. Although this AIDS prevention stuff my have no hope whatsoever, it may decades before the epedemic is in any way manageable, the problem is a wonderful excuse to deal with some of these deeper issues. Like GRS may not succeed in making this group into effective implementors of their prevention curriculum, but every day this week those people heard over and over again that they were valuable, that they matter, that they can change people's behavior, that they can influence a child's life. They were told and shown that what women say has equal weight to what men say. They were given a cause to increasingly be knowledgable about and have tools to contribute to the battle. They were given 2 meals and 10-20 Rand a day (about $1.50). Way more than the roughly 80% unemployed in Khayelitsha. And next week they will be placed in schools and communities where they will have the ability to present that same sort of justice to 40-80 kids a day. Pretty cool. So what if we can't beat AIDS. Maybe AIDS is exactly what Khayelitsha needs (obviously there would be a lot of people who disagree with that last statement). It is worth thinking about.
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