World Health Day

I did promise I’d blog a bit about this one! World Health Day is marked on 7^th April, and does pretty much what it says on the tin: its purpose is to share, educate and raise awareness about different health issues across the globe. It’s something Caitlin and I have been looking at with our classes over the past week, and something I thought was worth a mention.

I am very aware of the picture I will be painting for you, so I feel that now is a good time to formally remind everyone that the opinions published on this blog are solely my own; they are not representative of Project Trust, Nowak Primary School, the Namibian Ministry of Education or any other organisation I am affiliated with during my time here. Just me being me and thinking too much – only this time, I’ve decided to write and share them with you.

Joining in with World Health Day is especially important here, as heaven knows Tses has its fair share of many of the major health issues that southern Africa battles with. The infection rate of HIV/AIDS in Namibia stands at just over 20%, and the government respond to this with lots of funding for HIV/AIDS related programmes, free condoms are everywhere and almost every syllabus throughout the education system stresses some way of linking up the course material with raising awareness of the disease. It’s seriously impressive: many of my students can’t string a sentence together, but almost all of them can effortlessly reel off volumes of information and advice about preventing HIV/AIDS. The devil is, however, in the application. There seems to be a difference between knowing an awful lot and actually being informed. On one hand, we spend forever and a day encouraging kids of all ages to be aware of preventing HIV/AIDS ; on the other, Namibia also has a very high teenage pregnancy rate, and by our roughest guess-timating last night with Sachi, we reckon that up to 10% of our secondary school students  here in Tses could quite possibly be parents already. The question is, if all the kids know about using the importance of protection in the context of HIV prevention, where and why did that wisdom break down? A similar problem exists with managing HIV/AIDS. Health services provide free testing and treatment for those affected – no mean feat, given the extortionate cost of anti-retrovirals-, but the trouble is that managing the disease often requires a very structured schedule of taking medication at intervals and sometimes with food. What happens when you don’t have a watch, or you don’t know when your next meal is going to come? Throw in issues with TB, the fact that 40% of our learners rely on the government feeding programme at school, and a rate of alcohol abuse that our admittedly dubious maths estimates exceeds two-thirds of Tses’ population, and it’s not hard to see that World Health Day is directly pertinent to these kids as the future of Tses, Namibia and even Africa as a whole.

In an attempt to at least address some of these issues, we structured our lessons so that our classes spent all of last week doing work related to health issues. In BIS, they used library books to help them make posters about different diseases.

A, M & M in Grade 7A hard at work

T in Grade 7B (you have no idea how hard it was explaining that I didn't want her to pose for the camera)

S's finished poster, Grade 7A

A, N, A & D with their finished work, Grade 5A

In Arts, each class broke off into smaller groups to create and perform short plays about a health issue of their choice. We weren’t sure how this would go, as asking such a large group of such wild kids to do a task that is pretty unusual for them could all go horribly wrong. I have to say, I feel terrible at how sceptical I was : they were brilliant.

5B perform a short play about HIV/AIDS

The 6B boys attempt a sketch about teenage pregnancy (see below for more on that one)

The 6B girls in action

We had one of our grade 5s stumbling over all the furniture and rolling around on the floor in a play about underage drinking, and one of our grade 6 boys gave birth to a rolled-up-hoody-baby-bump in a sketch about HIV – as you do. The learners were killing themselves laughing. I was killing myself laughing. They were killing themselves laughing at me killing myself laughing. It was highly entertaining, and I think they had a lot of fun tackling what are, to be fair, some pretty serious issues for primary school children. Productive, informative, and amusing – dare I say it, it almost sounds like a proper lesson!