One of the challenges has been getting the targeted audience to show up at the trainings. The Choose Life curriculum is really centered around youth and peer educators, so at the beginning they asked the churches to send youth. Furthermore, many of the project objectives stipulate that 25% of whatever target (volunteers, trainers, beneficiaries) should be women. Well, instead of youth and women, mostly older men – church leaders and pastors - showed up to the trainings. And this trend has continued.
Gender is a key issue in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and gender plays a role in the epidemic here in Papua. Furthermore, women are often a good target audience for health messages as they will more often share them with their family and each other. For these two reasons it is important that women are involved as both the volunteers/trainers and as beneficiaries receiving the message. Certainly some of the men are very effective trainers and that they are leaders is important, there just needs to be some representation of women!
One of the groups at this training was Sunday School teachers and youth committee leaders from the Karubaga cluster. As Sunday school teachers are often women, it was expected that the audience would have a fair number of women. There was concern that only older men – pastors and church leaders – would come again. I was thinking, if we said it is training for Sunday School teachers why would the pastors want to come?? But come they did… out of 38 participants for the SS/Youth committee training only 2 were women.
So where were all the women?? Outside cooking and at home…
Apparently many participants thought there was an allowance involved and came as “representatives” for these groups. After it was reiterated that there are no allowances, this is a training to help them spread the message about HIV/AIDS to their existing groups (Sunday school, youth committee, churches…), the admitted they thought there would be an allowance and that was part of their motivation in coming. Supposedly they will actually send the SS teachers and youth committee to the next training, but we will see who actually comes in April!
Not only are women important to HIV/AIDS programs in general, but during the initial discussions they said that parents, and mothers in particular are the ones who care for sick people. And mothers are the ones who are caring for the children. So for both the home based care and maternal child health, it was critical to talk to the women, the actual caregivers, to get a better sense of the needs and feasibility of a home based care or maternal child health project.
The last day was a training for five couples, so there were five women present. The women participated less than the men, but at least they were there and appeared to be engaged! And I finally got to talk to some women about home based care and maternal child health. I hoped that the women would have more to say about their needs than doctors and medicines. And they did, but I don’t know if it’s because we learned by now to avoid the term needs, or if it was that they were women. They do want more knowledge and trainings, on both maternal child health and caring for patients. It was also revealed that the pastors wives are already meeting together weekly within the cluster, so there is also already a structure in place. As I said in the last post – potential!
We will see what happens at the next training – whether more women and youth show up for the Sunday school/youth committee training, and what further assessment reveals about the possibility of starting home based care and maternal child health with the pastor's wives group. The gender roles are so much a part of culture and the desire/need for financial incentives so great that it may take even more persistence to get men to step back and allow the women to come to the trainings – even if the trainings are labeled with titles that are primarily women’s roles!
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