Myths and Real Solutions
People need educating in all aspects of the AIDS virus. There are still many affected people who believe that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. People need educating in various methods of birth control, which then need to be made available at low cost.
One of the most positive experiences I had in Mozambique was witnessing a group of women who we called the Sweet Potato Ladies. This was a group of volunteers, local Mozambique women, who had been trained by World Vision staff to educate other local people in various things such as birth control, nutrition and the importance of breastfeeding infants. The thing that was amazing to me was that these women were reaching out to the peers on their own level. African people love to sing and dance. They do it at school, at church, in their homes, and basically whenever something good or bad happens. It is a huge part of the African culture, and an important way that they communicate to one another. So these ‘Sweet Potato Ladies’ made up song and dance numbers and performed plays to get their messages across. They would sing a song about nutrition, and then act out a play where a woman loses a baby because she didn’t eat the healthy things that a doctor told her to eat. You could just tell that the messages really were getting out to the people, because they were being approached at their own level. While lectures and booklets work well for us here; song, dance and drama work well in Africa.
The most valuable thing that I got out of the study tour was to understand the different ways that people can help, and that before we can really help, we need to fully understand the problem.
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