Children as Foot Soldiers against AIDS
- Category: Health
- Date 14-08-2005
- 344 views
AIDS will continue to grow by lips and bounds because in fighting it, the wrong people are carrying the wrong message to the wrong audience and inevitably deriving the wrong results. Consequently, Aids is spreading faster than ever, while last year alone saw more new infections and Aids-related deaths than ever before, according to the United Nations.
Children from Dogodogo Centre in Dra es Salaam are helping to curb the spread of HIV/Aids using a special project whereby, helped by their teachers and health workers, they would campaign against the pandemic through drama and music. Dogodogo’s Dr. Benadeth Mosha says that the project started in August 2004, performing in “four villages in every district”. (See: Dogodogo centre enlightening on Aids The Citizen Friday 8th July 2005, page 5). This is possibly the best way to confront the Aids problem today.
The popular adage that ‘when we hear, we forget; when we see, we remember; but when we do, we understand’, has got outstanding significance here. Children are sometimes subjected to long sessions of boring lectures, riddled with numerous technical, if clear expressions of adult interpretations regarding the situations that affect them. Many of the lectures on how young people can avoid Aids are packed with testimonies of adults and memories of their own childhood, experiences of past decades, which might be so long ago that today, their former lifestyles might not be relevant anymore.
Rarely do adults take time to contemplate on the effect of changing social, economic, and political trends in the society on the behaviour and way of life of the individuals in that very community. Child upbringing practices in the current regime needs be distinguished from the Mwalimu Nyerere era; the country’s first twenty-four years of independence with an impressive system for providing social services to communities.
Like all human beings, children’s needs, interests, and expectations change with time. Life is not static; therefore each generation must learn its own lessons. What a child of ten years ago needed, apart from the basic needs of life, is not necessarily what today’s child exactly requires. For example; the Internet, the mobile phone, the television, all have greatly eased communication whereas more and more orphans, and other vulnerably needy children are taking their own places in the community. The Aids pandemic has intensified its grip on society and its impact on the economic and social aspects of life is greater today than it was yesterday.
Childcare programmes can be extremely effective if they are educationally enjoyable such as through drama, not loud music and dancing, which are relied on by business companies and some churches that are merely wooing clients to their products. Drama is at once a form of entertainment, leisure activity, social binder, educational instrument, and an economic activity.
The power and usefulness of this simple construct will be fully achieved when development programmers recognise and respect the right of all human beings, including children, to be aware of and understand issues affecting their lives. An honest engagement of children in Aids prevention programmes can go a long way to encourage and secure them.
The new child protection initiatives require less complaints, blame and dictatorship to children; conversely they emphasise greater participation of children in shaping the issues that affect them. Children must be involved in designing their own programmes and pursue them comfortably – with a sense of ownership. It makes them grow ever more confident, understanding that by educating others, they are doing so to themselves, at little or no cost.
In Urban Jonsson’s “Human Rights Approach to Development Programming” (2003), UNICEF has made some authoritative observations: that HIV/Aids and malaria are the most important threats to children since the 1990s; and that at adolescence, most young people in Tanzania seem to rely heavily on their peer groups while relationships with parents become weak. Whereas religious, traditional and political leaders can provide some ideological and civic guidance, children’s Aids-related educational messages should be largely channelled through and managed by children.
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: Peering Eye, Sunday Citizen