Men´s Health

Over the past few years, Peace Corps Honduras has introduced a Men’s Health Initiative into the Health Project. The project focuses primarily on HIV/AIDS prevention education but also touches on other men’s health topics such as testicular and prostate cancer, smoking, alcohol abuse, domestic violence, etc. In Honduras adult men receive less health care and less health education partly due to the machismo culture. There are numerous NGOs that focus on maternal and child health, but few that focus specifically on adult men. In my site alone there are two NGOs that focus on reproductive health for women, one that does HIV/AIDS education for youth and numerous others with broad health goals but not one that works with adult men concerning issues of sexuality and HIV. Yet, HIV/AIDS education is crucial for adult men because they are usually the ones making the sexual decisions. So even if the woman receives education about how to protect herself there is not much she can do if her partner is not willing to use a condom. Therefore Peace Corps developed a workshop with a complete manual to teach adult men about safer sex practices. Last week I went to a Peace Corps workshop with somebody from my site to receive training on how to lead the workshop. It is really an amazing manual with hours of material ready to go. It is designed for all sorts of groups of men from university students to police to inmates to taxi drivers and uses a very raunchy approach.

Chicas Calientes: Literally means Hot Girls, but has the double meaning of horny girls.
In this activity we in up a bunch of magazine pictures of hot girls and all the participants have to choose three girls that they would want to sleep with at a party. Then we reveal that one of them has HIV and whoever slept with her is now infected and they consequently infected the other girls they slept with who consequently infected the other guys they slept with…etc. The point of the activity is to demonstrate the chain of transmission and that in essence you sleep with everybody your partner has slept with. We also demonstrate that the chicas calientes all look very healthy and that there was no way to tell that they were infected so you have to get a test to be sure.

Dice Game
On each side of the die a bodily fluid is written (semen, blood, saliva, etc). The dice are rolled and we ask the group to first use their imagination to think of a situation (conventional and not) where the two fluids would mix and then determine if this situation could transmit HIV.

Human Knot
Hondurans love dinamicas (fun games) and we throw tons of them into our workshops to break the ice and entertain and sometimes they even have educational components.

Condom Demonstration
We had humongous bananas for our condom demonstration!

¨Spin the Bottle¨
We play spin the bottle where one person has to ask “Why don’t you want to wear a condom?” The other person has to give a reason he doesn’t want to wear a condom and then the first person is supposed to give a rebuttal to why he should wear one. For example, “I don’t want to spend money on them” à “You can get them for free at the health center”. Although the activity sounds good in theory it is hard to make it work, the participants usually just say “I don’t want to wear a condom because I don’t like it” and the response is “But you should wear one anyway”.

I am very excited to start giving workshops in my town because although there is a lot of HIV/AIDS education going on in Santa Barbara, this is an area that is really lacking. Yet, I can’t do it alone, because obviously, I myself am not a man. Therefore I am starting to form a Men’s Health Team to go about the task. One member has already attended the training and will hopefully work with me to give workshops. I hope to train other educators to give workshops as well as network with the other NGOs that are already doing HIV/AIDS education to give us support.

Although I am really excited and have confidence that we can be successful the process is not without challenges. First, I decided to go to the workshop at the last minute and had to find somebody to go with me at the last minute. Somebody I met when I was translating for the medical brigade recommended a friend of his to me. He is finishing school and is the student class president. I was told he was 22 and a good public speaker. It turns out he is only 20 and a little shy in front of large groups. I think I had set my expectations for him a little too high so when he didn’t do an excellent job at the workshop I was a little disappointed. I did learn some valuable lessons though. First, I should be a little more careful about who I decide to work with and should take time to get to know somebody before I commit myself to work with them. Second, I need to accept people where they are and not where I think they should be.

The actual workshop given by the Peace Corps was also a little frustrating. We traveled about 8 hours down to San Lorenzo, Valle, in southern Honduras. It is supposed to be sweltering hot there but luckily we were in air conditioned hotel rooms and conference rooms, so we never really got the full effect. There were about 10 Peace Corps health volunteers and about 20 Honduran counterparts accompanying them. Most of them were respectful and participative. Others were a little too participative..The experience brought me back to when I was teaching for Health Space Cleveland. When I would go to give classes to the little kids, kindergarten and 1st grade, I would often have to explain the difference between a question and a story before I asked “Are there any questions?” because little kids don’t seem to know the difference and would raise their hands when I asked for questions and begin to tell a five minute story about this one time when…Well, unfortunately some people never learn the difference between a story and a question (or they just don’t care). Every time our facilitators would ask if there were any questions the participants would take this to mean it was time for them to stand up and proceed to give their own lectures. Although the air conditioning was cool and I was happy to see some other volunteers I was ready to go home after three days of hearing everybody’s two cents.