Lets Talk About Sex

(written 4/24/09)

Thats right… what I am about to describe to you will most definitely sound like an awkward movie scene but it is all in the name of educating the youth of Honduras. On Thursday 3 volunteers came to Ojojona to do a TOT (Training of Trainers) on HIV and AIDS which sounds really intense but actually involved doing a lot of fun activities to learn about HIV/AIDS and how it is transmitted so we could teach them to students at a local High School the following day. These activities included learning a game about white blood cells, doing a picture game of how HIV is transmitted, and then doing the ever popular condom on a banana demo. After we finished the charlas (lectures) and dinamicas (activities) we were split up into groups of 4 to begin working on our presentations for the following day. Now I was a little nervous because as you all know I am not typically the best with kids, ok let’s be honest I had no patience for them at all at home, and I have never taught anything to anyone so this was definitely going to be a day of firsts. However, I have already come so far in terms of patience and actually interacting with children of all ages that I would certainly surprise all of you. Therefore, once we were in our groups I figured why not jump in head first and offered to do the condom on a banana demo. Unsurprisingly my group members were happy to let me do it so, like a good student I went home and studied my condom vocabulary for the next day.

The following day I wore my best “teacher” dress and arrived with condoms and bananas in tow to get down to business. I had practiced all my vocabulary and prepared myself for a fair amount of jokes from the kids. What I was not expecting was to actually know three of the students. The weekend before I had gone on a beautiful beach trip with my host mom, sister, and her two boys to a private beach called Los Delgaditos with the local church. Of course, I was the only gringa on the entire beach and consequently caused quite a stir with my two piece bathing suit and tattoos (don’t worry I ran the whole outfit and tattoo thing by my mom before hand and she gave me the green light). Everyone was super nice and wanted to know where I got my cool tattoo as well as wanted to learn how to swim since apparently very very few Hondurans know how. Well in this group were some high schoolers who spent the majority of the day watching me until a few got up the nerve to talk to me. Lucky for me these same boys who were talking to me on the beach were in my class for the HIV/AIDS charla and felt like they were pretty cool because they knew one of the teachers, specifically the one holding the condoms. So I got a few more personal jokes from them than expected. Nevertheless, I forged ahead and with the help of my lovely assistant Kyle, who held the banana and did the appropriate thrusting actions when necessary, and successfully showed 21 Hondurans between the ages of 14-18 how to use a condom. I hope you all can picture me standing in front of a class putting a condom on a banana and being smi-serious about the whole thing because if that isn’t movie material, I don’t know what is! The entire charla lasted a little over 3 hours which was definitely long enough for everyone. It was a good thing also that we left the condom demo for the end of the class because there was no getting anyone to calm down after they were able to talk about sex and play with condoms for hours. However, it was obviously so important for them to learn this because so many of them had no idea how to use one and/or believed alot of the popular myths about condom use here.

One thing I did learn, apart from Spanish condom vocab, is that I am surprisingly comfortable teaching a class and that I actually even enjoy it. I am sure it had a lot to do with the age I was working with but I really was able to relate to the students very well and give my lesson without worrying about the language barrier. I think my personality and my ability to hear some pretty outrageous comments without "batting an eye" works a lot to my advantage too. Who knows after this maybe I have a future in teaching… or a career in condom demos, vamos a ver (we’ll see)!