I have been working hard to create the peer education curriculum and spent much of this week publicizing the program to the EFA’s youth groups of people living with HIV/AIDS. The training, which will take place in a 15-day series over the course of 2009, is open to any and all of the groups and specifically not the members of their executive boards, in order to give opportunity to those who are less likely to have strong reading or writing skills. It is pretty tough to plan a 15-day training without being able to rely on the writing or reading skills of the participants! I am really very excited about it, though! And excited that it is really something I will be able to see through to the end. Also, being able to work out the kinks of this year’s program and replicate for next year will be valuable to me, and will also result in a better training program!
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The planning for the Peer Education training went smoothly, and the first session took place over the last weekend of March. During the training, there were several moments that gave me pause and reemphasized why I do this work in the first place. Over the course of a few weeks, I went to each of the five youth support groups of people living with HIV in the EFA network to pitch the idea of Peer Education and encourage their participation. Generally people were engaged and certainly interested in participating. Since this is the first year, we decided to limit participation to two members from each association, or 10 people in total, in order to assure the quality of the training. I explained that after just five years, many of the associations would have all of their members trained. The simple response, by a woman certainly younger than me, was: “How can we be sure that we will live that long”? I wish that I could give her assurance that she could. Our work to help HIV-positive youth live positively promotes this.

In another instance, there was a woman who was especially eager to participate, advocating for her inclusion with great enthusiasm. But several days after she was welcomed into the program, she sent word to our offices that her husband would not allow her to participate. I sent word right back that if she wanted me or another EFA representative to advocate for her with her husband that we were free and eager to do so. But weeks passed and she did not respond. She seemed to be caught between her traditional role as a wife and her desire to educate herself in order to better manage her own health. Why must these two things go against one another?

After those moments of pause, we held the 3-day training without a hitch! As predicted, having a tri-lingual training – in French and translated into Fulfuldé and Mafa – requires patience. Likewise, four of the ten Peer Educators cannot read or write. But with some creativity, we managed to have a successful and productive training together. One of my ideas was to code the name tags based on language and literacy levels, decorating them with stickers. Whenever there was group work that required reading or writing, I asked for a “heart” to be in each group; heart stickers were on the literate members name tags. For all other activities, I asked for a “butterfly”, the illiterate members, to be in each group. The groups enjoyed a little extra mixing and mingling into their skills-balanced groups, and overall, better comprehension and participation resulted!

However, initially I was quite surprised at the levels of HIV knowledge demonstrated by new youth group members based on what they learned at the local hospitals. Each of the ten Peer Educators is HIV-positive, yet their health literacy, the demonstrated levels of knowledge that they had about ways to stay healthy, was limited. This is just one sign of the limited inclusion that patients have in their own treatment plans. It also indicates what kind pre- and post-test counseling people have when getting an HIV test result. Yet, the questions they were most curious about and snuck into the suggestion box, some even written in Arabic, had to do with the possibility of living a culturally “normal” life: getting married, having babies, fulfilling futures. These hopes are shadowed by a lot of fear and even more misinformation. I like to think about the possible ripple effects of this training as more and more people become aware of the control that they can have over their own health and therefore over their own prospects for the future.

They are hungry for more information, screaming for it, in fact. As a result of the Peer Education and Coordination Committee requests, EFA International decided to publish a monthly newsletter to help keep the group members abreast of news related to HIV/AIDS, nutrition, healthy living tips, group news, and basics about HIV. Support groups gathered for their regular meeting take time to read and discuss it together. This is another way that Education Fights AIDS.

-Caitlyn Bradburn, Peace Corps Volunteer

Tags: information, knowledge, language, literacy, peace corps, peer education, peer mentoring