All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [67]
Our next stop was a voluntary counseling and testing center, one of those vibrant storefront gathering places full of motivated, empowered locals who bring the gospel of medically accurate sex education, reproductive health, and the prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) to young and at-risk people. There were posters on the walls such as “A Human Being’s Sexual Bill of Rights,” including the right to know about your body, the right to have sex only with whom you choose and when you choose, and the right to be protected from disease. The centers also provide a forum to dispel dangerous rumors and misinformation about the virus. For example, many believe that it’s simply not possible for people who go to church to be infected with HIV. This myth fills coffins faster than small businesses responding to the demand can construct them.
Misinformation, however, is only fuel on the fire of the AIDS crisis in Kenya. The root cause of the HIV problem here is gender inequality and violence against girls and women. The sexual objectification of women leads to ongoing inequities in education, economic, property, and legal disempowerment, which in turn, of course, keep women and their children stuck in the violence of poverty. For me, the most fundamental expression of this poverty is a woman’s inability to negotiate, much less have control over, her own sexuality and fertility.
In Kenya, this inequity can been seen in cultural practices such as wife inheritance (a woman being required, upon her husband’s death—often from AIDS-related causes—to become her brother-in-law’s wife) or in the lack of economic opportunity for women, which leads to transactional sex—which is also often cross-generational sex, a ubiquitous phenomenon here. Sometimes it’s so simple as to cut like a knife: In the Lake Victoria region, the men fish, and the women sell the fish, and the men insist on sex in exchange for giving them the fish to sell. Cross-generational sex occurs when an older man uses his relative status and power to coerce a girl into sexual acts, sometimes in exchange for subsistence items she needs for her family or herself, such as a liter of fuel, or for aspirational consumer goods, such as minutes for a mobile phone card. Infuriatingly, there are documented cases of teachers demanding cross-generational sex from girls to permit them to remain in the classroom or to record accurate grades on their schoolwork. In such asymmetrical power relations, girls and women cannot negotiate condom use—much less abstain—and are totally vulnerable to the virus, pregnancy, and related negative cascade of poor life outcomes.
As grim as it can be here, there are some faint rays of hope. Some of the Protestant churches—a growing force in Kenya—have been backing away from their unrealistic stance on condom use. The night I arrived in Nairobi, the All Africa Conference of Churches was wrapping up a three-day-long HIV/AIDS conference. This ecumenical fellowship, representing more than 140 million Christians in thirty-nine African countries, had been slow to awaken to the reality of AIDS and had even contributed to the stigmatization of sufferers. But all that was changing. I felt very comfortable speaking at the conference. I am always most at home with people of faith and am heartened by talking about the HIV emergency in such a setting, because only when we all believe and accept the intrinsic worth of each and every person on this earth will we have the full motivation needed to stop the disaster of HIV/AIDS. And churches are accepting that they have to preach from the pulpit the truth about how HIV is transmitted and that they have to address within their faith the many social ills that contribute so mightily to HIV’s rampant devastation of Africa. I believe an effective wave of the future is faith-based organizations