Adventure!

first draft of a paper my group is turning in. FIRST not FINAL

We originally wanted to do a project that tackled poverty. When we broke poverty down into several of its root causes, we thought that unplanned or unwanted pregnancies due to ignorance of contraception could have been a potential cause. When we went out into communities to research this, however, we learned that there was a far bigger issue facing the Thai people: Thailand’s overwhelming lack of sex education.

Because of the taboo nature of sex in Thai culture, both teachers and parents try to avoid teaching sex education. Important information regarding safe sex is not taught to these healthy and sexually active young-adults. Without proper safe sex education, students remain susceptible to catching sexually transmitted diseases because they do not know how to prevent spreading or catching them.

This ignorance has led to an HIV/AIDS pandemic for young-adults: within the 15-24 year old age group it is the second leading cause of death. Despite this, safe sex still remains an uncomfortable issue to talk about. 88% of students want to learn more about sexually transmitted diseases and prevention, but there is currently no structure in place to provide this education.

Initially, we hoped to provide sex education by creating a student group on the Rajabhat campus that would go into classrooms and villages to teach the subject. We though that a peer-led approach would make talking about sex easier to do. We quickly learned, however, that our grandiose idea would not work with the time restraints we had for our project.

After much deliberation, we came up with the idea of teaching students about safe-sex and then having them participate in some sort of event where they could share what they knew. Over the course of several days, it became clear that this event would be handing out brochures at both Nantaram village and a local market.

We received help from both Family Planning Northern Thailand who had their speaker, Benjawan Surichiwa, come in to give the sex education presentation. The presentation ran from approximately 8:30 to 11:00 A.M. Thirty six Rajabhat freshman attended the presentation: very few had ever had a sex education course before. We really didn’t know what to expect from Surichiwa because our communication with her had been limited: we only confirmed she was speaking the day before. Needless to say, she was excellent. Her presentation was lively and used a combination of group activities and lectures. The most interesting to watch (for the Americans at least) was how shy the Thai students were about drawing genitalia.
After the presentation we asked the freshman if any of them were interested in volunteering to hand out brochures about what they had learned that day. Sixteen students said that, yes, they would like to come help us out. In the end, we decided that asking them to help all day would be too much and settled for them helping us at an afternoon street market.

Before we could meet with our volunteers on Saturday, we spread our awareness campaign to Nantaram village, the former home of Nat, one of our Thai group members. At Nantaram village we split up into three groups: one Thai and one American then headed off to see who we would bump into. We brought 180 brochures to Nantaram and gave them all away either to people we met on the street or to leave in restaurants that were frequented by our target population. The brochures, which gave a brief introduction to sex education, provided information on how to prevent sexually transmitted diseases and also included a diagram on how to properly use a condom.

Later, when we met up with our freshman volunteers we were excited to see how actively they would participate and were stunned by their lack of shyness. We paraded down the market with a big sign that said “Let’s talk about sex” in Thai and handed out brochures to young-adults who were at the market.

People seemed genuinely interested in the brochures we were handing out – though we were met with some odd stares. Looking back, our biggest issue was how quickly our fliers went. We brought 320 brochures and 220 condoms to the even and within a half hour had handed them all out save the ones our volunteers were keeping “to show to their friends and family.”

Our project came off tremendously well and everyone in our group truly believed in what we were doing. Despite the face that we had to scale-down our initial vision, we accomplished what we set out to do in a methodical manner. More importantly, however, we accomplished our goal in a way that involved both the Thai and the American students equally, without any real group conflict.

The biggest problems our group faced were trying to find a speaker who was interested in helping us with our project. We went to several organizations before finally securing Benjawan. Another difficulty was getting condoms. Due to Thai culture, we needed special letters specifying how many we wanted and for what purpose.

Finally, we learned a lot about cross-cultural relationships. While the Northeastern Students stressed punctuality and turning in assignments on time, the Thai students continually made us wait either to depart for a meeting with a local non-governmental organization, or for their work to be completed in Thai. But perhaps it was a blessing in disguise as now we walk away with better patience. Another issue or group faced was that our Thai group members had an identical course schedule: if one Thai student was missing, they were all missing. But we were distinctly blessed in the fact that we never really had to employ a translator in group discussions because Nat’s English was excellent.

All in all we accomplished what we set out to do and had some fun along the way. We gave 36 college freshman an important introduction to sex education and spread more knowledge to another five hundred. Ideally, we would hope that a student group on campus would be interested in continuing the work we have done thus far as we believe that is important for communities, families, and individuals to know.