All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [66]
We pulled up in front of a wooden church to meet a group of HIV-positive peer educators and youth outreach workers. After the usual howdy-dos, we followed on foot behind the YouthAIDS team as they set out to show me their stuff in very dramatic fashion. They use ingenious ploys to attract a crowd, pretending someone is being chased or beaten in an act of mob justice, or in this case carrying a colleague on a stretcher, shouting that someone had tried to kill himself. Word spread quickly, and within minutes hundreds of barefoot kids were sprinting toward the action.
Once the crowd was big enough, it was bait and switch. The PSI youth team broke into one of their fabulous, charismatic, powerful skits that has many plots but one message: HIV/AIDS kills, and prevention is fundamental to staying alive and healthy. When the skit was over, the team capitalized on the crowd’s thrall and began a question-and-answer session about HIV/AIDS. One young woman in the audience asked whether or not you could get HIV from mosquitoes (FYI, you can’t)—a sadly revealing mix-up with another big killer around here: malaria, a disease PSI also had innovative programs to prevent and treat. AIDS had been ravaging Kenya for more than twenty years, but there was still so much to learn.
We poked around the slum, waving, saying hi in bad Swahili, and admiring tiny, colorful shops. Fifty percent of Kenyans make their living through agriculture, mostly subsistence farming, but in cities and slums they survive by scavenging and selling little things in the informal economy: onions, perhaps, or secondhand shoes (or a single shoe), or by sharpening knives. There are small stands and makeshift businesses everywhere, announced on crude but colorful painted signs, and I loved paying effusive compliments to the owners.
I was thrilled to see how many young people in Huruma knew about “Chill,” a wildly popular social marketing campaign. It used fun, hip-hop sounds in commercials to create an upbeat and empowering message about delaying the first sexual experience—or reclaiming abstinence if one had already been sexually active. It was aimed at ten-to-fourteen-year-old children—who are just about to make the choices that would affect the rest of their lives and are often being pressured to do so. Wherever we made the “Chill” hand sign to young people—it looks like a “V” for victory or a peace sign—the kids cheered and flashed it back at us. Abstinence has become cool. The kids join Chill clubs in school, where the code word is Nimechill—Swahili slang for “I Am Abstaining.”
We walked up a flight of crooked, decaying stairs in a cement-block building to visit the flat of Abiud, one of our peer educators. He unlocked a bright green door and ushered us into a six-by-eight-foot room with a spigot and squat hole toilet on his floor. By Huruma standards, Abiud lived like a king; he had the entire place to himself, whereas most such rooms accommodated entire families. He had a bed off the floor, some stereo equipment, knickknacks, soccer posters, and a David Beckham T-shirt for decoration, along with scores of motivational and reflective quotations placed everywhere. His rent was $10 a month, which he paid with his PSI earnings. I sat on his bed with my arm around him, looking at his photo album, telling him how proud I was of him and to keep up the good work. He was twenty-one, HIV-positive, trained to give his testimonial to others to help educate and protect them. For his work he was given nutritional supplements, some health care, counseling, and support. Like other peer educators I met in Kenya, Abiud told me