JOMA Conference

The weekend after Janet’s REDES getaway, we were on the road again, this time both of us, for a get together in neighboring Manica province with three other JOMA groups. JOMA is a mixed-gender youth organization fostered by Peace Corps, which focuses on communicating healthy lifestyle messages through various media. Our youths have focused mostly on community theater, which we have written about after our various holiday performances. This year we have added journalism at the request of our school director. The 16 hours of conference sessions focused mainly on gender issues, HIV/AIDS, and sexual health. Since all of our counterpart teachers responsible for presenting the material were men, they called Janet up on several occasions to explain menstruation and the use of female condoms. We also got to share our journalism and theater projects to a receptive audience. Some of the concepts in the curriculum are still too progressive, especially material about tolerance to homosexuals or women’s right to wear sexualized clothing instead of traditional dress, but our kids were receptive to most of everything else. The hosting school was a new World Bank-financed project and extremely fancy, especially when compared to our community-built classrooms. They have a library, where we held our conference, a dining hall, an illuminated sports court, where Luc got to play basketball for the first time in 20 months, grass, which we weren’t allowed to step on, and a student quad, with benches and bulletin boards. All great things, but it did give our group an inferiority complex. We took plenty of photos and ate plenty of food, sometimes at the same time, like when our students asked us to take their picture with them each holding their half-chicken dinners (more meat than they could expect to see in an entire month).
Any time we take high school aged kids on long distance trips it’s an adventure, and this time was no exception. We rented a chapa, the rundown minibus used for public transport, from a local we’d done business with in past, who we recently discovered is the father of one of our worst 8th grade students. His van is older and more beat up this year, but much to the pleasure of our music crazy students, he had upgraded his sound system, turning our transport into a veritable rolling disco. The only problem was the generational divide, which emerged when deciding the play list. Our counterpart teacher held the remote control the first leg of the journey and put all our students to sleep with his “grandpa” DJ selections, but as soon as one of the youngsters got hold, it was all the latest and loudest Zambian hits, which they know all the words to, with a few Ke$ha and Rihanna songs we could sing along too in English. Luckily we had separate hotels for the young men and the young ladies, although this meant we also had to sleep apart, since each of us was assigned to chaperone our respective gender’s hotel. Janet’s room was situated directly above the town’s most popular discotheque, and adjacent to the town’s second most popular disco, so she didn’t sleep much. Luc also didn’t sleep much, especially on the last night, since the young men kept attempting to make unscheduled late night exits. Luckily he was in room 1, so it was impossible for them to get out without walking by his open door. Needless to say with a group of about 35 teenagers plenty of new friendships were made. On the way back our students made us stop at the cell credit store so they could buy the 50 text message recharges with their per diem money they were supposed to use for lunch. We made a grand entrance into town with all our kids waving condoms out the windows and yelling safe sex slogans to their classmates as we drove past the school. Our students were very excited to be seen with us and have everyone know they were trained as youth activists. Our driver was also very excited and wanted to take us all the way to our doorstep, but since there is only a path, he gave up about 100 yards short of our gate, but we appreciated the effort.