Nurseries and HIV

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It rained this morning - did not expect that in the dry season! Yeserday was a very good day. I went to nursery in the morning and taught the kids tens and units in maths - well I say taugh, more shouted while they messed about. The kids are really sweet though so you end up not minding too much. My favourite part of nursery is definitely break though, because the kids are always so happy and full of life. Of course this does mean that you end up being used as a climbing frame - on girl can actually put her arms around my knees and climb up to my neck! She's about 7 years old as well so it does hurt! Teaching is good but a little frustrating; we're often left on our own to teach which is fine, but dfficult with only basic swahili. I wonder whether it wouldn't be beter to have teachers in the room as well to translate, but that rarely happens.

HIV seminar was cancelled for the second day in a row - there's some sor of dispute over land in the community so they don't want the mizungu (white people!) there. I went to my friend's adult english class instead, which then turned into an impromptu HIV seminar! It was a really good debate with some fantastic questions, and the men there clearly wanted to learn (it was a male group of 18-25 year olds). One guy was happy to inform us that he had a big penis so how could he get the right condoms? Should he take measurements to the pharmacy? We also had some rather sensitive religions-meets-science type questions to answer, as well as stuff on gender equality. One of the guys was getting really frustrated because he tried to share information from a previous seminar in his village, and they tried to beat him for talking about HIV! He wanted to know how to go about talking about it so that people listened and didn't react like that. It's such a difficult question to answer, but we went from the angle of educating the youth so that in time stiga disappear. All in all a riveting 2 hours, they flew by!

Overall I'm finding the volunteering really interesting but pretty frustrating. Despite gentle warnings from experienced friends about the amount of value you can add in 3 weeks, you do still come out here with a lot of hopes and expectations, even when you've tried really hard not to. To be honest even people here for longer haven't had the impact they had hoped for. I find the HIV project more rewarding though - eve if yuo only reach 5 people, who then educate 5 people and so on, it's still

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