STD's!

Today Anem and I taught class at the local university.  We were invited (somewhat serendipitously) to teach this class to a young group of students majoring in Women’s Health and Gender Studies.  Once they knew there were going to be some American doctors visiting, they specifically requested we teach them about our health system as well as STDs.   I was a little nervous for two reasons.  First, the class was scheduled for two hours and it’s been a while since I’ve stood up in front of 40 people to teach something.  Second, I had a little taste of “Montezuma’s Revenge” this morning, and I didn’t want to have to run out of class suddenly for that.  Anem and I had planned for several hours for this class – her part on the American Healthcare System, and my part on STD’s.  Taking some Imodium and antibiotics, along with knowing we’d planned a lot in advance, settled my nerves and stomach for the session.

The class was made of all girls and 2 boys, and was held in an airy classroom with hard wooden desks and a chalkboard that would barely write.  By airy classroom I mean that all the windows were open and the door wouldn’t shut, so we heard cars, people walking outside, and noise from all the changing classes and people visiting outside our room. 

We introduced ourselves and then Anem started the talk.  We basically asked them what they knew about the American healthcare system, and we filled in the blanks from there.  It was really amazing how little they knew about our (complicated) system, but how they were able to predict its problems once we laid it out for them.  They had a lot of interesting and insightful questions like “what happens to healthcare when people get old and sick”, or “what happens to your insurance if you lose your job”, and “why don’t rich people want to pay for healthcare for poor people”?  Hopefully I would have made Stuart proud for the answer I gave to that last one!

Then my topic came.  I was a little nervous talking to a new group in a relatively new culture about a pretty taboo topic.  In a lot of cultures it’s probably not great for a woman to stand in front of class and use words like “penis” and “discharge”, but it’s also important to be blunt with those topics so as not to risk giving misinformation (or not enough information).  I had a lengthy discussion planned, but fortunately/unfortunately because of all their questions we couldn’t make it all the way through!  We did talk about the individual and societal impacts of STDs and how these are disproportionate towards women, and then went through all the STD’s in a bit of detail in terms of how you contract them and the symptoms they give.  I learned a few things, like apparently in some areas in Uganda you automatically get treated for Syphilis before you get married because there’s such a high incidence of it.  Also a lot of people think that women are “bewitched” if they can’t conceive.  Hopefully I corrected that assumption somewhat as I told them that actually untreated Chlamydia is the #1 worldwide cause for infertility.  Before we could get to a rousing and controversial discussion on prevention of STDs, we ran out of time!  It was really quite flattering that everyone seemed disappointed, and actually probably half of the class stayed late for more discussion.  We just had a question and answer session for an additional hour.

One of the more interesting things that came out of that was a discussion on homosexuality.  You may know that President Musevini here has recently signed a bill that effectively outlaws homosexuality, and can actually put someone in prison for being gay.  In my conversations with a few people here, it seems that most Ugandans think homosexuality is immoral, but overall feel this bill was a ploy used for re-election purposes.  Interestingly homosexually has technically been “banned” here since Uganda was a British colony in the 19^th century, so this bill really isn’t anything new.  Regardless I was quite shocked to be asked “if a homosexual man contracted HIV, would you still treat him” and “what would you do if you found out your family member was gay”?  Definitely off topic, but still good questions to talk about and hopefully we educated these young co-eds a little along the way!