One of the more eye-opening experiences I had was our two-day visit to a fisherman’s village in Chennai. People here provide food and an income for their families both by fishing and selling fish and sea products. We stayed at a small community center near the beach that was home to a small staff and one woman, European I believe. What she was doing there was never quite clarified to me, but rumor had it that she was learning how to make soap. That’s about as far as my knowledge extends about her.

The community center divided our group into two small rooms—one for the girls and one for the boys. While the accommodations were spacious enough for the girls (there were after all only 9 of us,) the SIXTEEN boys were shoved into an identically sized room that for whatever reason an alarming amount of spiders, insects and geckos seemed to prefer over the girl’s room. How comedic!

The meat of our trip was the two teachings we did. Though by now all of us were seasoned volunteers who understood the curriculum and how to teach it to the best of our abilities, this audience was much different—Tamil speaking fisherman and their wives. For the first time, our English and our teaching quirks would serve no benefit. We had to strip down the teaching to its bare bones and teach the facts. While initially this seemed like it would make the processes easier, my teaching group found it anything but.

So in a community such as the fisherman’s village, customs are significantly more conservative that in the city. Thus, girls only interacted with girls and boys with boys. Thus the teaching group was reconfigured and divided up by sex. My new group consisted of two other Indian girls, Kayva (Cawv-ya) and Neha (Nay-huh), as well as myself. We went to a nearby location with a new counterpart named Kalai (Kah-lay) where we faced a room full of fisherman’s wives and daughters. A teaching that should have lasted about one hour ended up taking a little over three. Not only was translation essential in this circumstance, but dear Kalai had an amazing talent to take a good 5 minutes to translate one sentence. Either way, the hardest thing we found was conveying the concept of HIV transmission.

So IAPA’s curriculum uses a system known as “Fluids and Doors” in order to teach HIV transmission. Essentially there are only five fluids in the body that can actually hold the HIV virus and only four doors, which are openings into the body, that these HIV positive fluids can pass through and actually transmit the virus.

The five fluids are:
Blood
Breast Milk
Semen
Pre-ejaculate
Vaginal Fluid

And the four doors are:
Open Wounds
Anus
Penis
Vagina

That’s it…five fluids and four doors—the basis of HIV transmission. And though we kept repeating this, for some reason the concept was not making any lasting impact. These women still thought that the virus could be transmitted through fluids like urine and saliva and through doors like the skin and the mouth. Frustrated as we were, we plowed on continuing to reemphasize this particular lesson. We tried to make them repeat the fluids and the doors but every single woman refused to do so. This tried our tempers but also peaked our curiosity…so we asked why. One woman was brave enough to tell us. Though the fisherman communities are known for promiscuous behavior, alcoholic men, and lack of protected sex, women are not allowed to talk about any of this. In fact, from what I gather, they’re not allowed to have any sort of opinion at all. The reason that refused to repeat any of the fluids and doors was because if any word got back that they had even been saying words such as penis, anus, and vagina, not only would they would be frowned upon, they would also be hazed and beaten by others in their village. One woman expressed fear about being kicked in the ovaries. At this point, we stopped pressing them and took into account their social background. Instead of making them repeat the fluids and the doors, we did it ourselves and by the end of the lesson, it appeared that things were finally clicking.

[On the plus side, the several repetitions of this lesson made me very well versed in Tamil. I can now saw almost all the fluids and doors in Tamil!]

The next thing we moved on to was the lesson in sexual transmission and prevention—the second most important thing that we taught that day. Because HIV is transmitted most commonly through sexual intercourse (89 percent of infections, actually) it was very important that we emphasized prevention by the means of condoms. Though it was a little bit awkward to talk about we explained things as best as we could and did our first condom demonstration of the summer! Well, Kavya did anyway.

By the end of the day, it appeared that we had gotten through to these women, and despite all the initial frustration that we suffered, I do honestly believe that we made some sort of lasting impression. At least, I certainly hope we did.

The evening after teaching was, as cheesy as it sounds, a total bonding experience. There’s no television, no internet, and only one communal laptop and no real source of entertainment, outside of each other, for quite some distance. So, we kicked like they did in the old days and actually talked to each other. And when we got bored of that, the majority of us crowded around that one laptop and watched a Hindi movie together. Just kidding, we didn’t really get bored. But we did really watch a Hindi movie. It was called Dostana—think the Indian Chuck & Larry/Three’s Compnay. Check it out!

Also one of the IAPA India staff, the amazing Louis, taught us songs and told us jokes. And we closed off the evening when we all played an interesting hot potato-charades hybrid game. It was semi-embarrassing, generally awkward, but overall a lot of fun!

The next day was run very much like the first day. However, my group’s teaching ended up being cancelled—the women we were supposed to talk to were not able to take any time off. We did, however, end up spending some time with two of the girls who had helped to organize the teaching. They took us down to the beach and talked to us. Through Kavya and Neha, who understand much more Tamil than I do, we learned a little bit about their lives. Both of these girls are smart, they work in a school close to the village and it appeared that they have their own aspirations in life. They asked all three of us about love, whether we had “anybody to love” back home and whether we would marry them. We later found out that both girls are set to be married in the next few years to their Uncles—they have no real choice in the matter.

With that, we came back to our community stay and received quite a grand farewell—we were given seashell garlands and all the works!