Children enjoying a warm meal at the Hope House Assemblies NCP during my first visit there.
When we arrived a little before 11, music was already blaring out of the large concrete church building. The time of praise and worship at the beginning of the service was just what I needed. The music was wonderful, and we sang some familiar English praise songs. The pastor and his wife are from Zambia, and as a result the entire service took place in both English and Siswati, which was very helpful. Faith Bible School was introduced and the team presented their abstinence drama, adjusted slightly to take advantage of the fact that Valentine’s Day is this week. This drama is one of the more popular ones and this time was no exception. The team had the whole congregation, but especially the youth, on the edge of their seats, and sometimes rolling off of them entirely in laughter.
The basic gist of the drama (as far as I can understand, since it’s always presented in Siswati) is this:
Two guys are discussing their plans for Valentine’s Day. Vusi is trying to get his girlfriend, Lindiwe, to spend the night with him at a fancy hotel, and he wants Lindiwe’s friend, Nomsa, to get together with his friend Sabelo. Vusi askes Lindiwe and she agrees, saying that she will send him a message telling him when to expect her.
Later on, Lindiwe is talking to Nomsa about the plan. Nomsa tries to convince Lindiwe to abstain and eventually she agrees. They write a letter to Vusi (the boyfriend) which begins, “Hi Vusi. Abstinence first, love affairs later.”
The boys enter, talking excitedly about their plans. Nomsa comes in, delivers the letter, and leaves. The boys are thrilled, and quickly snatch it up to read it. But their excitement disappears as they realize the choice that Lindiwe has made. They are upset and frustrated. Then one of their friends, Themba, enters. Themba has committed to abstinence, and tries to convince them that it’s the right thing to do. Eventually, they agree with him.
Lindiwe enters, afraid at the response she will get from her boyfriend. But Vusi hugs her and tells her that he agrees that abstinence is the right way. The team hums “Amazing Grace” while a team member gives a short speech directed at the youth of the church, encouraging them to abstain. Then the team exits singing a beautiful gospel song, “I was shaken by God Almighty…I am no longer the same…”
Team members performing the Faithfulness drama at a church in Matsapha last year.
Usually when FBS does a presentation, they are in charge of the whole service, and lead a time of singing, provide an MC, give the Word of God (or sermon), and present two dramas and have a discussion afterwards, encouraging the congregation to share what they’ve learned from the presentation. But Hope House Assemblies had already invited a guest speaker for the service, who turned out to be the chaplain for the Swazi National Police Service. The first thing he said when he came to the pulpit was how inspired he was by the drama and the team’s abstinence commitment. He shared that he and his wife had both abstained until marriage, and that as a result they can now trust each other to remain faithful. He even shared about his personal experience of going for an HIV test, and encouraging his wife to do the same. He didn’t share the results with us, (as he rightly said, “That’s none of your business!”) but even so, it was the first time that I’ve heard someone in a position of authority in the church talking so openly about HIV and AIDS and their personal experience with it. It was so encouraging to hear, and I think his sharing really strengthened the impact of the drama.
He went on to preach about a topic which fit quite nicely with our message as well. He spoke about holiness and his main Scripture was I Peter 1:15 – “But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do.” He talked about people who lead double lives, who are one person in church on Sunday, but during the week at work or home they are somebody else entirely. He also talked about how holiness is what God desires of us, and that the beauty he wants to see in us is the “beauty of holiness.” He ended his message with a prayer and invited those who recognized that they weren’t living holy lives to come forward and recommit themselves to God.
I thought that his message was right on target. In Swaziland, there is a huge gap between public and private life, especially in the area of girlfriends/boyfriends/lovers. Here is an example related to me by none other than one of the FBS youth: He had been walking along the street in Manzini with a girl he was friends with from school. Down the street, he saw a female member of the health team, walking hand-in-hand with a boy. When she saw my friend, she left the guy she was walking with and bolted across the street, avoiding any eye contact. When the two team members saw each other at prayer meeting later that evening, things were awkward between them and neither one brought up their previous encounter. To really bring the point home, my friend who was telling me the story pointed to the pictures of the health team youth on the wall of the FBS office. “How many of them have told you about their girlfriends and boyfriends?” he asked me. I scanned the faces and replied, “None.” He smiled and asked me if I really thought that they were all single. “It’s just not something we talk about,” he said. “I don’t know why.”
This reluctance to talk openly about anything related to sex is a huge factor in the spread of HIV and AIDS in Swaziland. Most children don’t learn any facts about sex from their parents, so what they do know is gathered mostly from their (usually equally ignorant) friends. Is it then a surprise that part of the reason some youth, especially girls, start having sex so early (sometimes at 14 or 15 years) is that they were simply curious and wanted to know what it was like? (Of course, a large factor is economic dependence as well. It’s common for young girls to have “sugar daddies,” someone who they sleep with in exchange for clothes and a cell phone, or at a more desperate level, money for food.) One of the myths circulating about HIV and AIDS is that it’s something Americans made up because they didn’t want Africans to enjoy sex. Another one I’ve heard, even more disturbing, is that HIV was invented by the white people to kill off the blacks.
This lack of information and, in some cases, misinformation is combined with the traditional Swazi custom of polygamy. Although this practice is becoming less widespread, it is still fairly common in the more rural areas. I know that even some of the team members’ fathers had (or still have) multiple wives. So when, as a nation, you have this kind of cultural background, when combined with the secrecy around sex, the situation that results should perhaps not be surprising. It is quite normal for young women to be unmarried, with several children by different fathers, and still entertaining multiple boyfriends. Similarly, it is a matter of pride for men to see how many women they can sleep with.
When you bring in the matter of condoms, this becomes quite tricky. First of all, there are more myths and misconceptions floating around about these: “They spray the condoms with the virus and that’s how it spreads”, “If you use a condom, it means you don’t trust your partner”, and my personal favorite, which is spread widely among the youth – “How can you enjoy a sweet with the wrapper on?”
Trickiest of all is the matter of condoms in the context of the church. Traditionally, the stance the church takes is that the youth are abstaining, so they don’t need condoms. They seem to be, for the most part, quite oblivious to all the teenage pregnancies and kitchen-table abortions that are all too common. (Illegal abortion is another subject entirely, but a while back there was a gruesome story in the paper about a rural midwife who had been discovered to have dumped 80+ aborted fetuses in the pond behind her house.)
FBS does not promote condoms, toeing the line the church has laid down: Our youth are abstaining. They shouldn’t need condoms. Imagine what people would think if they found a condom in your pocket or purse! At our annual youth camp in December, two doctors from the Baylor Clinic in Mbabane came in to do a presentation on the basic facts about HIV and AIDS. Normally during the talk, they demonstrate how to use a condom properly, and then they distribute condoms at the end of the session. However, FBS asked them not to. The reasoning behind this was, and this is a direct quote as clearly as I can remember it, “What would happen if they went home and told their parents that they got condoms at the FBS camp?” Although it was a rhetorical question, I can answer it: It would look like we are encouraging them to have sex.
So the reality is that many youth are NOT abstaining and many marriage partners are NOT remaining faithful. But because of complicated intersections of ignorance and myths and stigma and the tremendous appeal of sticking to the status quo, it’s difficult to do anything about this. Fighting HIV and AIDS is all about “behaviour change,” which is a phrase those working in the field like to bat around a lot. Whether it’s a change from having unprotected sex to using a condom, or from five girlfriends to one, or from promiscuity to abstinence, or from being scared to find out your status to going for an HIV test, or simply from being ignorant to educating yourself, fighting the pandemic takes a decision. It takes change. And this is especially difficult in a context where people are content to do things as they’ve always been done and where unquestioning obedience to authority is the norm. Especially problematic is when there is a lack of strong, knowledgeable leaders of integrity to guide their people.
So, this complicated matter of “behaviour change” lies at the heart of the scourge of HIV and AIDS in Swaziland. It never fails to depress and frustrate me, because you can talk at people all you want, educate them and give them the tools they need to help themselves, but until they decide to make a change, nothing is going to happen. Sometimes this makes me want to scream and cry in frustration. Like the other day at Hope House (the rehab center where I’ve been volunteering, not the church, see previous blog post) when one of our patients had been sent to the hospital to collect the drugs to begin ARV treatment. He came back empty-handed, and the minder who had accompanied him explained that the doctor had been telling him what the drugs were and what they do in the body and when you need to take which ones, when the patient got up and walked out and flatly refused to accept the drugs. The nurse who told me this story just laughed in a hopeless way, as if saying, “What can you do?” But I wanted to scream. I wanted to run to the patient and shake him and yell, “Don’t you understand? Not taking those drugs is like lying on your deathbed and refusing someone standing in front of you offering you life on a golden platter!”
So that’s one side of this behaviour change. The other side is that all it takes to step toward life is to make that choice yourself. As the pastor said today in preparation for the altar call, “Making a decision is power.” So as I watched the 30+ young people up on the stage this morning, rededicating themselves in their efforts to live a holy life, I could only pray that they will gain the strength to follow through on their convictions.
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