Looking back at my previous post, I may have been a little too optimistic about the changes I seemed to have perceived here in Zambia with respect to cultural norms and gender roles. Granted that among the younger generation, there is indeed much more awareness, openness and understanding of the cultural constructions of gender and sexuality, in reality, there are still many, MANY misconceptions and misinformation about something as widespread as HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.

Only a few days after writing my earlier post, Jamie and I attended the International Voluntary Counseling and Testing (VCT) day festivities. There we met a friend of ours who is a peer educator and a very active member of UNZA (University of Zambia) HIV/AIDS response office. Harboring the assumption that all young and educated Zambians are thus actively involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS, I was shocked to hear from our friend that despite being on the forefront of various marches, campaigns and other activities, there is to this date not a single person at UNZA campus who has openly admitted that he/she is HIV+. The first and only case was a student a few years back who is sometimes referred to as a hero and sometimes as a sham, a faker who only wanted money and fame (!) UNZA itself provides VCT services and admittedly many many students get tested and of course in a country where HIV prevalence is 16%, there is bound to be a few positive results. These students, however, never come out in public and openly admit and discuss their status. The problem, as my friend put it, is that these students conceive of HIV/AIDS as a "poor person's disease". Ignorance and silence feed into one another in a vicious cycle such that based on these misinformed perceptions, students refuse to admit their status. As a result, those who are HIV+ rarely know another friend or classmate who is also HIV+. According to my friend, this is one of the biggest obstacles in fighting the stigma and also in keeping a healthy attitude upon finding out one's HIV status. He spoke of a 4th year Law student who allegedly committed suicide after doing a VCT on campus and supposedly testing positive.

Learning about these things, I now try to be more critical about people's attitudes and their apparent ease and openness to discuss HIV/AIDS. This past week was a perfect example of how despite education and information, underlying perceptions and prejudices persist at every level of society. As part of their advocacy work, ZARAN had organized a workshop for the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), where representatives of around 30 different unions attended a 3 day workshop on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights in the Workplace. I have to admit, I was quite entertained specially on the first day with questions and comments from this group of highly educated and socially aware individuals. What surprised me most in that setting was the belief that HIV can be cured. The point that to this date there is no cure for HIV/AIDS had to be stressed over and over again. There was also a lot of misinformation about the mode of HIV transmission. Despite explaining the almost zero possibility of contracting HIV from mere contact in the absence of visible and open wound, some participants stuck to their stubborn view that when it comes to having domestic workers who are HIV+ and children at home, human rights should be sacrificed for the protection of the child. It was very frustrating to see that in their view, no amount of education and information could safeguard against innocent children catching HIV, which almost made the point of our workshop- focused heavily on information dissemination and education- obsolete and lost on some of the participants.

This common thread of ignorance and misinformation runs through a lot of other sectors/ issues in society. Last week I met with the Clinical Services Manager of a well-known NGO called Marie Stopes International(MSI), active in over 40 developing countries and providing safe abortion among other reproductive health services. The abortions they perform here in Zambia are "legal" in a sense that they follow the requirements of the Termination of Pregnancy Act, which allows for abortion based on medical grounds, and asks for the consent of 3 medical practitioners, one of whom must be specialized in the area in which the woman is seeking the abortion based on..... Imagine these vague requirements, on top of a form that has to be filled and signed by these 3 doctors and submitted to the Ministry of Health, and still imagine.. that there is a provision in the act allowing a doctor to refuse to perform an abortion based on "conscientious objection". Not quite the smooth process that you expect to be provided with when you have already made the very difficult choice of having an abortion. So the law, stigma, Christianity, and so many other factors stand in the way of having a safe abortion in Zambia. I met with this doctor at MSI who is famed for being an outspoken activist for safe and legal abortion in Zambia. He used to work at Lusaka's biggest public hospital (University Teaching Hospital) at the gynecology ward for 8 years, and told me horrifying stories of an average of 100-200 women who would DAILY crowd the halls of the hospital to seek help due to complications of "incomplete" and illegal abortions. Some of these women still have pieces of wood or stick stuck in their vagina, others take battery acid, others resort to traditional womb massaging that in fact bursts the uterus instead of inducing an abortion.

What struck me as most odd however, was that according to Dr. Kamanga, not just these women and the public in general, but even so many of the health practitioners and POLICE force don't know that abortion is "legal" in Zambia (well, "legal" as was described above). What is interesting is that there are 3 provisions in the Penal Code that provide severe penalties for procuring "unlawful" abortion. As Dr. Kamanga put it, "the police know the law very well, and don't know the law at all"- meaning that they memorize the penal code and know every possible offence and provision in the code but do not know about other laws that have been enacted. Also, to his recollection, none of these 100-200 women who daily seek help as a result of "unlawful abortion" get prosecuted, neither are the ones who provide them with services. The police only get involved when someone actually informs them of a girl/woman having an abortion, and by the time the police bring the "offender" to the hospital to verify that, there is almost no sign of the procedure (considering that everything went well) and thus no evidence to prosecute. I am planning to spend a day at UTH to observe and maybe get a chance to speak to a few of these women.


For a brighter note on the fun side of our experience here, please refer to Jamie's post below! It suffices to say that we made a pact each (which we are very likely not going to keep) to see the remaining 6 natural wonders of the world- after the breathtaking sight of Victoria Falls. Oh and, we did jump off the Zimbabwe-Zambia bridge over Zambezi. It was my first and Jamie's second official "the hell with you, life!" move and it felt great. Although, I didn't really jump so much as I was elegantly "pushed-off" the bridge by the friendly operator (or 'sexist' shall we say??) who clearly assumed me, a girl, could not possibly muster up the guts to freely jump to my demise.

Tomorrow we are re-visiting the mighty Zambezi (the fourth largest river in Africa) for a weekend of canoeing and safari in Chirundu, Lower Zambezi. I wish everyone an awesome weekend, good health, and happiness- wherever you are.