Changing (most) minds

I had a couple of beers on Monday night with one of my students and a woman recently back from Sierra Leone. She went to do a bit of damage control after she lost funding on a project that's halfway through its implementation. It's a radio serial with some sexual health education undertones. She tells me that in central and west Africa there's a lot to do in terms of reproductive and sexual health. She threw out some stats, including that only 13% of Nigerian women use contraception actively.
"Thirteen percent?" I ask her.
"Thirteen percent," she confirms.
Apparently that's representative of many of the surrounding countries' family planning patterns.

So, first they built clinics. 'They' as in the local and international aid community, not her organization specifically. But not much changed. Then they trained doctors and nurses and community healthcare workers and anyone else they could really. Still no change.
"But why?" was my first question. "Is is a matter of access? Or stigma? Or some upside-down cultural norms?"
"It's not access," she maintains, "particularly not in the urban areas. Or at least access doesn't account for the extent of the non-use."
"So...?" I left my question looming over the table.

That's where they--her organization--come in. Their radio and TV programmes address behaviour and attitudinal change. They target young people--everyone does--and they embed "use a condom" messages in the soap opera scripts delivered to the listening public. It has been phenomenally successful, if their impact research from Sierra Leone is to be believed, and she doesn't believe it.
"We did the research and it turned out that 57% of new clinic users were coming to the clinic because of the show. The number seemed too high, so we asked the firm to redo their analysis. They did and they come up with another 57%. So we sent the data back to Vermont, and we had our own guys look over it. It was still 57%. Now they want to see the actual questionnaires, the pieces of paper. So when I left last week the staff in the local office packed it into a big box, I got to the airport and the guy at the airline told me I was overweight.... [long story short]... I was able to take half of the questionnaires shoved into an extra duffel bag, the other half are sitting in the airport in Freetown."

She doesn't need to persuade me, not really. Attitude change is about the most impossible thing to quantify, but anecdotally, I know it's what makes the difference. Like, I was sitting with a new partner yesterday, in a cramped little office near the Kuwait Taxi Rank in Site C. The walls of the office were covered in photos of his daughter, slips of paper with names and numbers on, and certificates denoting all the courses he's completed. I sat on a squeaky chair, we all did, all four of us; my knees rubbing against the woman's sitting next to me. It's an IT project, and they run programmes for everyone from youth groups to elderly ECD centre managers. And it's here that he tells me the importance of attitude.
"When they started, these women," he pauses to point to the photo on his screen of a group of greying women in aprons, sitting squinting at the computer screens in front of them, "and I showed them how to type, they told me they couldn't, "my fingers won't work on this" they said. So we had to persuade them first, before we could start, that their fingers could work. They used to think Facebook was a dating site, where their grandchildren went to cause trouble, but they changed their ideas and now they have pages for their creches and childcares and they learnt how to put pictures up and they do."

It's what the principal of a high school in Khayelitsha told me when I sat with her after rushing down Mew Way from the IT centre in Site C. "You can teach teachers the content, you can always learn content, but if they don't a passion, or love for the kids, if they don't want to be here..." she shakes her head, "we'd rather not have them."

From Sierra Leone to Site C, seems word on the street is wording the same thing: you can build clinics and computer labs, but the fireworks only start popping when people realize they've got to use them, that--at the risk of sounding Obamaesque--they can. All the rabble-rousing got me excited for change and for action and taking a chance, so I switched to chai but it's not for me and I'm back on rooibos and maybe I am too rigid in my attitude toward tea but it is what it is and not even subliminal messages in the lefty news I read can change my mind.

VIVA LA'ROOIBOS, VIVA!!