“That is how a girl proves she is a woman. In Africa, you cannot tell anyone to stop having children. They will even think, ‘I would rather have AIDS and leave my children when I die. At least I will have produced my three,’” he said.
Prostitutes, too, have disincentives. They typically get US$5 for sex, but US$10 to US$20 more for sex without a condom. (Though it did not come up in Bwindi, prostitutes elsewhere in Africa have complained that some clients secretly bite holes in condoms because they believe flesh must make contact for the sex to be real.)
Labor patterns also contribute. Men disdain cooking and laundry as women’s work, so when they work far from home, as many do here, they often pay a local woman to do both, and sleep with her. Meanwhile, a counselor said, “the wife will find a man to buy salt and soap and roof her house.”
Also, much sex is what social scientists call “transactional.” Young women from all but the wealthiest families are under constant pressure to trade sex for high school tuition, for grades, for food for their siblings, even for bus fare.
“If a woman says to me, ‘Please give me 2,000 shillings to get to the pharmacy,”’ said Topher Kamara, 46, the counselor who is a former officer, naming an amount equal to US$1, “I will say to her: ‘You want 2,000? Lie down and surrender your goods.’”
Atwongyeire described a girl who “found a sugar daddy” because she needed sanitary pads so her classmates would not tease her.
The once-widespread rumor that sex with a virgin cures AIDS has faded (as has a local rumor that sex with a pygmy is a cure). However, men still pay teenage girls because they fear “reinfection,” and, Kamara said, “because older women will make us push them to orgasm, but a young girl will let him satisfy himself and leave.”
Sex education hardly exists. By law, counselors may discuss condoms in high schools but not demonstrate or distribute them.
As a result, rumors abound. For example, they said, many young girls believe condoms can “get lost inside,” causing infections. A government campaign promoting Pap smears backfired when people decided condoms must cause cervical cancer.
Strangest of all, Kamara said, the mix of disbelief and fatalism is so powerful that he and female counselors have been propositioned after giving AIDS-awareness talks in churches, at which they make a point of announcing that they are infected.
“People say: ‘Oh, I don’t worry. Sleep with me and we will all have HIV together,’” he said.
RSS