From what I understand part of this problem is made worse by the Catholic churchs view on contraception. There was a programme on TV last year on the pope and the message he was trying to bring about contraception and sexual behaviour, and the impression that I seemed to get was that the catholic church (especially in Africa) frowned on the use of condoms and have found some "medical" information to support their claim that condoms did not stop the transmission of AIDS, to the extent thay tried to ban condoms.

Absintence might be ok for some people but not all !!, espicailly when they are given conflicting message by those "in authority".

As an aside one of Sunitas friends refuses to give money to Oxfam, because Oxfam refuse to send/distribute condoms as part of any aid package.

PS. I miss you too !

The difficulties of talking about sex remind me of work that I used to be involved in years ago. HIV/AIDS awareness and sex education was seen as fine and (relatively) easy to talk about when focusing on the young majority population, but people reacted very differently when it involved people with disabilities. Suddenly the responses changed to the sort that you’ve described, people would get awkward and talk around or change the subject - in my experience mostly not the people who actually lived with a disability. This was even stronger when the people concerned had a mental health or learning disability, with some people becoming very offended and anxiously looking around for some sand to bury their heads in. Pretty much exactly the same thing happened if talking about sex among older people, say over 70. It also happened but in a slightly different way when talking about people who know they have HIV - here the ostrich mentality was particularly strong,and was linked to Moral Outrage, and people often wanted to stick with the ‘just say no’ message. And we all know how successful that is when looking at human behaviour….
I don’t know if there’s anything useful in all of this for the situation there, it just made me remember some things. I do think it’s useful to reflect on the fact that ‘our’ sexual liberation and ability to discuss these issues openly can often tend to be restricted to those that fit within certain categories.

And another thing …. Your last entry about whether to achieve things by working at the political national or international level or at a local community level. I think both are important, but that it’s essential to have the same people moving between the two levels. I have no experience of this in international aid settings so again what I’m talking about is things that it made me think about here. I’ve spent a lot of time around public services here at both levels, and have often been apalled at the lack of understanding, especially the lack of understadning that government/civil servants have of the local community level - either the service providers or the service users. I think it’s this lack of undersatnding that has led to some of the worst policies that just don’t work. There’s always seemed to be a huge reluctance to genuinely involve people with that community level experience (I mean properly involve in designing, running etc. not just a half hour consultation) and the relatively closed shop and frequent we-know-best arrogance of the civil service has contributed to keeping the necessary knowledge well away from where it’s most needed. Because of this, many of the people at the community level never get the chance to find out how things work at that government level and so the lack of understanding goes both ways. So people don’t have any common language or ways of thinking about things, so of course they can’t find common ground or effective ways of working together. I think that all of this has opened up here a lot over the last few years but there’s still a long way to go.

rant over
:blush:

D
x

Your comments on speaking of sex are ver insightful. I remember a TV programme in which a wheelchair user explained how hard it was even to buy pornographic magazines in the UK: he had to ask someone to fetch them from the top shelf for him).

As far as I can see the best way to work on this is to just keep talking about it and pushing my own comfort zone so that I can appear comfortable, confident and non-judgmental about it. What do you think?

The issue of communication between levels is also setting things off in my head. Thanks for that also. I guess there is little incentive for openness and communication if one or more of these perceived levels of administration is engaged in corruption or theft that they’d rather didn’t become common knowledge — or rather, it’s already common knowledge but they’d rather not reveal the details.

Another barrier to effectiv communication is the cultural thing, at the top sometimes are foreign donors with their own agendas. In the recent VSO committee meeting I attended I heard that when people from the VSO office in london come to visit Nairobi they stay in a high luxury hotel. We were debating the fact that the subsistance allowance for mandatory visits to the capitol does not pay for a hotel in which any of us feel safe or comfortable. Its worth a lot **just seeing what its like**. Sometimes I take for granted the fact that I am seeing quite a lot of what its like, while still remaining in good comfort over here. You have reminded me how lucky I am that I am not cooped up in an air-conditioned suite.

Looking forward to when you come and see with me. I’m sure it will open my eyes to have a visitor from the UK, to hear what you will say and what strikes you as odd that I might be already accepting as normal. ooh! can’t wait!