Because They're Burning Bricks

It’s been a while since I updated, and even then I was skipping over a lot of stuff. It’s kind of amazing: it’s like I have a life here or something. Anyway, the thing I really should go back to write about is Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World). There are two camps put on by Peace Corps volunteers. In June the first year health volunteers put on Camp GLOW for girls around the country. In November the first year education volunteers put on Camp Sky for boys and girls around the country. GLOW had about 80 girls for one week at the Montfort School for the Deaf in Chiradzulu. I taught yoga before breakfast every morning at 6am. The first day we had presentations, I taught HIV & Gender.

It was so nice teaching 20-30 students at a time instead of the 70+ that I’m used to at my real job. And to have the time and appropriate level of subject matter to actually be able to get into some of the nitty gritty. The girls had memorized the basic information about HIV so well that in my three separate classes, when I wrote down what they knew about HIV/AIDS*, the first thing I had to write on each of the flipcharts was “It’s a Killer Disease.” This is probably related to the song that goes (in a disturbingly uptempo tune and accompanied by much wriggling of the hips and other enthusiastic gyrations), “Edzi, Edzi, Edzi, it’s a killer!” The next four items were also the same, although occasionally item 2 would be in item 4’s place, and the like. It was the details that snagged them. Some girls couldn’t understand why it still makes sense to use condoms when they aren’t 100% effective**. Attempting a quick rundown on what percentages and probabilities mean just ended up confusing the issue.

When asked why young girls (15-19) contract HIV at 4 times the rate of boys the same age, one girl said she thought it was because that’s the age that girls start making vaginal fluid and that because of that, they get HIV. It was all I could do not to start yelling, “Dry sex bad! Dry sex bad!”

It was really fun though, having the girls write out stereotypical behaviour of both Malawian men and women and then discussing how those behaviours and beliefs can be used to help prevent risky choices. I was also happy to notice that while the Malawian counselors’ moms never talked to them about sex, most of the campers’ moms did because of the risk of HIV.

One older girl later asked me if it was true that you will kill your boyfriend if you have sex with him during menstruation. I was torn about how to respond because misinformation is a serious problem, but that specific misinformation is one of the reasons women get a break from being required to have sex with their SOs. In the end I told the truth, but that bitter feeling of having put something in motion that won’t go where intended caught up with me later.

I also learned that in some tribes girls are taught how to lengthen their labia, which is then supposed to grip the man during intercourse and increase his enjoyment. Apparently the men also play with the labia to increase the woman’s enjoyment, which makes it a nice, if odd and slightly disturbing, turnaround from the normal sexual routine here.

The girls here find themselves in a weird position where their sexuality is both encouraged and condemned (hmm, guess that’s not so unfamiliar after all). When I asked the girls whether they ever had strong sexual feelings, they said no, but when I asked if those feelings ever get too strong, nearly everybody was in agreement. Later on I was reading the same VSO article and the author was discussing how girls’ sexuality is encouraged so as to make early marriage more palatable to them. But then their sexuality is locked into strict societal mores so they won’t go outside their marriages and they will accept their dissatisfying sex life.

Oh, and from the VSO newsletter I discovered that one of the reasons men consider it a mark of pride to orgasm as quickly as humanly possible here is because if a woman ejaculates inside a man (don’t ask me how exactly that will happen, I don’t know), he will get pregnant. Since there’s nowhere for the baby to go, his abdomen will swell and then he will die.

There’s an awful lot about the sexuality of Malawian women that can kill a man, apparently.

The girls were bold and bright and amazing. The first night we had a bonfire and asked all the girls to split up along tribal lines and then to do something to demonstrate their culture to every one else. There’s a Chewa group called the Gule Wamkulu that does traditional dancing and the like. They’re supposed to be powerful magic and the membership roster is secret.*** So we were shocked when the girls came out costumed and doing the male Gule dances. But shocked in a good way. They were good at them, and we didn’t ask them to break those rules—we just provided a safe place for them to do it.

The night before the last, we had a talent show, where we discovered that though we had become fond of the girls, we weren’t enough like parental units to not check our watches every 5 seconds, hoping that all the girls were finally done being talented. The skits were especially interminable, and showed some level of multiple personality disorder. One group put on a skit about preventing early marriage and finishing school and waiting to have children. Ten minutes later, they put on one where Americans came to town, met some Malawian girls, and then married them so they didn’t have to finish secondary school. Um, yeah.

Oh well, it’s a slow row to hoe, out here in Malawi. We just keep working at it and hope we get somewhere eventually.