With World Renew's help, KIDO utilized an HIV-response training called "Stepping Stones" in Amuria. It was very successful. They planned to give 180 people the training, but more and more people kept showing up and they had around 450 people by the end of the weeks of training which took place on Saturdays over four months. I've looked through the Stepping Stones manual and it is excellent and culturally appropriate. It focuses on relationships and communication and family issues rather than the nitty-gritty science of HIV. In fact, this training has proven to be greatly valuable in this region for other reasons even besides the HIV prevention aspect. Families have come away transformed.
On Friday, we traveled to Amuria to hear the stories of people who participated in Stepping Stones and to see the ways that it has transformed the community.
Stepping Stones is a training available to all people of all faiths. So when we heard the testimonies of participants at a local church, one of the men testifying about the program was a Muslim. The pictures below are of a few of the representative participants talking about the program (and also their children).
The material encourages you to be very personal and open about your life, your marriage, and how you treat your children and leads to very tangible change. It has helped to bring down abuse in families, and the people who have taken the training are even guiding their neighbors to reduce abuse in other families. People have been taught how to talk to their children about sex in general and about AIDS, and this is something very uncommon in the Iteso culture. Girls were taught how to say "no" to boys and men who might pressure them to have sex. Parents learned how to communicate with their disobedient children rather than - (quote from a participant) - "beating them or burning their hands." After the training, couples do more together in public. In Iteso culture, rarely do you see husbands and wives doing things together or showing public affection. But now couples who have taken the training sit in church together, and move around together. Men are now discussing their daily plans and financial activities with their wives.
This is a tangent, but we learned that in some areas of Uganda, women's savings and loans groups have been really successful and some women start doing really well financially. Interestingly though, sometimes this has the negative effect of making the husband feel worthless, so that he will just get drunk all the time while his wife not only does the cooking and raising of children, but is the breadwinner as well, thus taking on responsibilities of the mother and father. This doesn't seem to have happened with this group of people in Amuria we talked to who had taking Stepping Stones, even though some started these types of savings groups following the program. But I think it's another interesting lesson of making sure we think about the culture when we do development work, and thinking through possible ramifications of what we are doing.
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