What Does your Thirteen-Year-Old Carpenter Know About AIDS?

A matter of perspective

Like most Francophone West African countries, Benin has a Projet Nationale Lutte Contre l'SIDA (PNLS, the National Project to Fight against AIDS), and like most national projects, PNLS could use some improvement. At the headquarters of PNLS in the Ministry of Health, two employees of AFRICARE are permanently stationed to help advise the architects of Benin's national program. AFRICARE is a large and well-funded NGO that can be found across the continent, often in some impressively remote locations, doing development work of many varieties.

In Cotonou, they have decided to focus on "capacity building," a popular term in the field of development work. They want to help local NGOs to operate more professionally and with better results. To initiate their current project, AFRICARE placed advertisements on the radio that invited local NGOs that have a commitment to fighting HIV/AIDS to come for interviews with AFRICARE staff. Somewhere between 150 and 200 different organizations responded, hoping to benefit from the attention of a well-funded and well-respected international NGO. After a lengthy phase of assessment, AFRICARE selected twenty Beninese NGOs with which to collaborate. Leading members of these local groups were then brought together for training in management and survey work.

AFRICARE prepared these groups to spend several months carefully gathering data from people in their areas about sexual thinking and behavior as well as decision making about health care and the variety and accessibility of medical attention. The information gathered in this initial phase forms the baseline of the four-year study. The subcontracted groups are supposed to use this baseline information to tailor-make special four-month pilot programs of sensibilization (the common term for informational mentoring sessions about AIDS and sexual health). The results of their efforts can then be diagnosed with follow-up surveys and AFRICARE can decide whether or not to fund an extended version of the pilot programs that have been initiated.

The teachers with their visual AIDS

Apparently their expectations are fairly exacting. Ms. Sodolou Fo Odile, who is responsible for the four-year initiative, explained that AFRICARE periodically withdraws its support from organizations that are showing little dedication or thoroughness. When this happens, AFRICARE goes back to the pool of original applicants and gives another NGO the chance to prove itself.

One of the local NGOs that is pleasing AFRICARE with the quality of its work is the Centre de Recherche et des Initiatives pour l'Auto-promotion du Monde Rural (CERIAM, the Center of Research and Initiatives for the Self-promotion of the Rural World). CERIAM is run by a quiet and well-organized man named Kodo A. Ludovic. He operates just outside the boundaries of Cotonou in a suburban area full of working-class people. His modest offices are inside his compound and include a dinner table with ten chairs and a small working area with several wooden filing cabinets for storing the copious data that he collects. His project is overseen by Bonon Barnabe, who knows CERIAM's work so well that he often interrupts the founder of CERIAM to explain it himself.

The two men explain that Mr. Ludovic meets with the young laborers in his vicinity, returning to their workplaces with regularity in order to establish a trusting relationship. They have been forthright with him, disclosing information pertaining to the frequency of their sexual encounters, their condom use, and their surprisingly diverse sexual tendencies. Both men are eager to point out how few of the respondents used condoms when they were first contacted—it was a dismal percentage, below 5. The people that Mr. Ludovic has been speaking with apparently did not receive the first round of broad mass media messages about the reality of the AIDS epidemic.

The carpenters assembled

Mr. Ludovic and Mr. Barnabe took us on an unscheduled visit to a woodworking shop, sandwiched between a shop of young female seamstresses and some tire salesmen, where eight young males were shaping planks of wood over a bed of sawdust. They recognized the delegation from AFRICARE and removed a picture of Jesus from their workshop's central pillar in order to expose a framed schedule of their meetings with Mr. Ludovic. These carpenters had between three and six years of formal schooling each. None of them had completed a single year of high school. At least five of the carpenters were under eighteen, the youngest was thirteen, and the oldest, by several years, was twenty-seven. He remained shyly in the back of the workshop, clearly not the group's spokesperson. A twenty-one year old carpenter answered most of the questions on their behalf.

He said that they had heard of AIDS while listening to the radio in their workplace, but that they had not understood the message, and that they were particularly unclear about ways that AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases could be contracted or prevented. In order to demonstrate their awareness, Mr. Barnabe began to quiz them. He is a commanding speaker; the boys concentrated hard and, between them, were able to produce the information that he expected. Sometimes a younger one would run out of symptoms to list or preventative measures to employ, but someone else in the workshop was generally able to finish the task. It is difficult to imagine a group of blue-collar workers subjecting themselves to this sort of performance in the West. It is difficult to imagine that they would respond with respect and deference to the man who stepped from the AFRICARE sports utility vehicle in white-collar clothing to test their knowledge in front of three strangers. It is a testament to the achievement of these men that they were respectfully received and listened to attentively, despite the sudden and perhaps invasive nature of our surprise visit.

An explanation

The carpenters took these men seriously as authority figures and as mentors. When we were turning to leave, the spokesperson halted the AFRICARE delegation briefly, to ask a new question that had been confusing them. He said that they wanted to know how long it takes to manifest symptoms of HIV/AIDS after you catch the disease. Everyone listened as Mr. Barnabe took five minutes to answer this question in clear and simple terms, deploying metaphor, examples, and pantomime to solidify his point. While the carpenters were not heartened by the content of his answer, they understood him. He made sure of that by quizzing them again.

There are immediate human benefits to the modest local work being done by AFRICARE's twenty pet NGOs. But there is also a larger goal towards which AFRICARE is moving. With the knowledge and experience that they gain by encouraging many different approaches to survey taking and sensibilization, they will be able to make clear recommendations to the architects of Benin's national program. Ideally, they will be able to point out the weaknesses and gaps in the government's attempts to educate its population and they will be able to suggest particularly effective means of bettering the situation. If this work can be done more efficiently, a great deal of time and money can be saved that is sorely needed for other social initiatives.


Cotonou: Nights Under a Streetlamp
A unified front in the fight against AIDS along the Corridor in West Africa