.JPG)
Last Saturday, Feb 24th, was the N’cwala ceremony, the annual gathering of the Ngoni tribe. To be honest I’m not entirely sure what the official purpose of the gathering is but it’s something to do with the tribal leaders and Ngoni people paying tribute to their paramount chief and welcoming the end of the rainy season. The latter is a little redundant nowadays as the rainy season has got later and later in recent years and therefore the rains don’t stop until late March at the earliest.
As if to prove the point the heavens opened as we were travelling to the site 40klm outside of Chipata. This wouldn’t have been too much of a problem had we not been sat in the back of a flatbed truck with no roof. Most of us managed to stay dry by huddling under the gazebo roof we used on our stall and putting up out brollies. Needless to say out umbrellas are no longer waterproof.
The site as we arrived reminded me of Glastonbury 1998, unfortunately there was no pyramid stage or Tony Bennett but everyone was knee deep in mud. It also became obvious quite quickly that rather than fulfilling their tribal responsibilities many people seemed to be there for the party, enjoying the little sachets of purple liquid which as far as I could work out were something close to pure alcohol.
I, on the other hand, was working. Along with the peer educators, we’d jumped in a flatbed truck early in the morning (still over an hour later than scheduled) ready to teach anyone who was ready to listen the delights of condom use, being faithful, abstinence, VCT (voluntary counselling and testing) and the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse. Unfortunately, the latter went out the window when two of the coordinators got drunk, some role models they turned out to be!
That aside, I was really impressed with the peer educators energy and enthusiasm. They genuinely seemed to believe that what they were doing was making a difference and when one came up to me to ask if I’d noticed if anyone was offering VCT on site because they had a young girl who was ready to go for an HIV test, I had to agree. In fact, the whole day renewed my faith in what it is I’ve been recruited to do here. Our stall was inundated with young men whose faces betrayed the fact that they’d never really seen, let alone used a condom before. We carried out over 50 condom demonstrations and distributed 300, we would have given away a lot more had we not run out. Despite the interest during the one2one discussions most people stated that they didn’t trust condoms because they aren’t 100% safe. The ‘abstinence only’ camp choose to ignore the fact that 98 times out of 100 using a condom correctly will prevent the transmission of STIs including HIV and unwanted pregnancies. I suspect as a result, many young people when they do (almost inevitably) become sexually active, write condoms off as an effective means of prevention. Sex, without a condom even within marriage is most definitely not 100% safe especially in a place where the HIV infection rate is over 25% and monogamous relationships are rare..JPG)
We didn’t get to see any of the ceremony which I’m not too sad about as the paramount chief drinks the fresh blood of a bull killed during the finale. I was most impressed by a couple of lads we know who watch our bikes outside the supermarket back in Chipata. They’d walked 40klm that morning to sell scones and ‘softies’ at the festival and were at outside Shoprite the following day bounding about all smiles
As if to prove the point the heavens opened as we were travelling to the site 40klm outside of Chipata. This wouldn’t have been too much of a problem had we not been sat in the back of a flatbed truck with no roof. Most of us managed to stay dry by huddling under the gazebo roof we used on our stall and putting up out brollies. Needless to say out umbrellas are no longer waterproof.
The site as we arrived reminded me of Glastonbury 1998, unfortunately there was no pyramid stage or Tony Bennett but everyone was knee deep in mud. It also became obvious quite quickly that rather than fulfilling their tribal responsibilities many people seemed to be there for the party, enjoying the little sachets of purple liquid which as far as I could work out were something close to pure alcohol.
I, on the other hand, was working. Along with the peer educators, we’d jumped in a flatbed truck early in the morning (still over an hour later than scheduled) ready to teach anyone who was ready to listen the delights of condom use, being faithful, abstinence, VCT (voluntary counselling and testing) and the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse. Unfortunately, the latter went out the window when two of the coordinators got drunk, some role models they turned out to be!
That aside, I was really impressed with the peer educators energy and enthusiasm. They genuinely seemed to believe that what they were doing was making a difference and when one came up to me to ask if I’d noticed if anyone was offering VCT on site because they had a young girl who was ready to go for an HIV test, I had to agree. In fact, the whole day renewed my faith in what it is I’ve been recruited to do here. Our stall was inundated with young men whose faces betrayed the fact that they’d never really seen, let alone used a condom before. We carried out over 50 condom demonstrations and distributed 300, we would have given away a lot more had we not run out. Despite the interest during the one2one discussions most people stated that they didn’t trust condoms because they aren’t 100% safe. The ‘abstinence only’ camp choose to ignore the fact that 98 times out of 100 using a condom correctly will prevent the transmission of STIs including HIV and unwanted pregnancies. I suspect as a result, many young people when they do (almost inevitably) become sexually active, write condoms off as an effective means of prevention. Sex, without a condom even within marriage is most definitely not 100% safe especially in a place where the HIV infection rate is over 25% and monogamous relationships are rare.
We didn’t get to see any of the ceremony which I’m not too sad about as the paramount chief drinks the fresh blood of a bull killed during the finale. I was most impressed by a couple of lads we know who watch our bikes outside the supermarket back in Chipata. They’d walked 40klm that morning to sell scones and ‘softies’ at the festival and were at outside Shoprite the following day bounding about all smiles
No comments:
Post a Comment