Grassroots Organizing intern Rachel Belieu had the opportunity to work around HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention in Vietnam during the Spring 09 semester. Here, she shares with us some of her experiences and how they relate to the need for comprehensive sex education domestically.
We were sitting in a stuffy classroom in Can Tho, the fifth-largest city in Vietnam, when we heard the statistic. We had been in Vietnam for over a month now, and that day we were fresh from the 1000-mile, 45-hour train journey that brought us from the cloudy streets of Hanoi to the sunny, humid Mekong Delta, a tangle of vegetation and waterways that sprawls over the southern-most quarter of Vietnam. The man before us, a professor of health at the local university, was trying to convince us that the Vietnamese were educated, informed, and prepared to handle the great public health challenges of our time.
"In the urban areas," he told us, "80% of the general population has 'good knowledge' about HIV/AIDS."
My friend Hannah and I glanced at each other, raising our eyebrows. We had been fed bogus statistics like this before ("100% of babies are born in the hospital") and before Hannah looked away, the seed of a project had germinated in my head, and I suddenly knew what I wanted to research during our two-week visit to Ho Chi Minh City.
During the spring semester, I participated in a four-month study abroad program that took us from Washington DC, to Tanzania and then Vietnam. What were we studying? In a word, Health; probing the medical, political, economic, social, and environmental aspects of that loaded word. In every place we visited, we set aside several days for research, cooking up projects of various degrees of feasibility and carrying them out.
Our project in Ho Chi Minh City was the most open, and with a few other young ladies from my program, I designed a survey to assess knowledge about HIV/AIDS. We then hit the streets, armed with a translator, interviewing students hanging out at the university, adults exercising in the park, and the migrant workers quietly descending on the outskirts of the city. In every demographic, in every age group, in every income range, the results were the same; people did not fully understand HIV/AIDS, how it is spread, and how it can be prevented.
I was vaguely triumphant for a moment; we had proved the lecturing professor wrong, we had uncovered the lies, the number-fudging behind yet another statistic. And then I remembered the implications of our findings; people in Vietnam were living their lives without adequate knowledge to protect themselves from one of the most fearsome diseases of our time. I was quiet then; the seriousness of the problem seeping into me like cold water. Later, we discovered troubling details about what passes for “sex education” in Vietnam. I will be sure to touch on these in another post.
This internship has really increased my awareness of how desperately our young people need the education we campaign for, but my ears are also trained on cries for help far from home. Everyone deserves proper education about sexual health. This is a big challenge, but one we can all relate to and benefit from solving. I’m the ultimate believer in “think global, act local,” and this internship is bringing me closer.
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