Alexandra Kamler

Alexandra Kamler
Antigua, Guatemala

This was my last day teaching the workshops at INVAL. I am flying home in a few days and we are wrapping everything up. I had not spoken with the director since I had gotten parasites and could not come to teach. The phone company Movistar, the cell phone provider for many people in Antigua, including the director, and myself was not working this morning. So, Andrea and I went to INVAL as we would any other morning, hoping the Director could create an opening for us so we could finish teaching the students. When we arrived, she seemed more tired and overworked than usual. As we sat outside her office, she whizzed by us apologizing for the wait and said she just received a call informing her that one of her friends was killed. Thus far, when someone has told me that a friend of theirs was killed here they say, “lo mataron” meaning “they” killed “him” but who “they” are is never explicitly stated. As we were waiting, Andrea told me that 38 people die in Guatemala every day and most of those deaths are due to politics. She says that the closer it gets to Election Day, September 11th, the higher the death toll becomes. I was trying to think if I knew a number relative for the United States but realized that to find numbers like that so blatantly shared with the public is not as common. I have no idea how many people die per day due to gang violence or politics in the United States.

After class, we went by to give our condolences and say goodbye to the Director. We started to have a conversation about the project we had done at the school and what she thought about it all. She mentioned continuing the project but that there are a few challenges with a school like INVAL. The director told us that the government had given up on their school. For a school with 600 students attending morning classes she receives 10,000 quetzal for all of the school supplies, photocopies teachers need to make, toilet paper, cleaning supplies, medicine in the school infirmary, everything. 10,000 quetzals is equivalent to around $1,333.33 U.S. dollars. That amount is intended to sustain and supply everything the school needs from January through August. Instead of renting out spaces for community activities, the Director asks for supplies: Clorox to bleach the floors, paper and pencils for the students, markers, anything. She asks for donations from all areas. This extremely low amount of money to maintain an entire high school would explain the lack of toilet paper and soap in the bathroom.

INVAL is an experimental school so there are laboratories for students who want to learn a trade such as becoming an electrician, a chef, a baker etc. For those students, if they want to cook a chicken and learn that recipe the students have to get together, pull their money and buy one chicken between the ten of them. They buy all of the ingredients and any other cooking supplies they need. All students in those kinds of classes are expected to provide anything the course may require if they want to participate in the activities and lessons.

When we entered the director’s office, she was at her desk signing letters. She shared the letters with us. Due to the lack of money and supplies the school has no medicine for any child who feels sick, who gets hurt during the day, or supplies for the girls who get their period for the first time during the school day. If a child gets into a fight and needs stitches or becomes seriously ill, the Director will send them to the community clinic and the parents have to pay. There is no medicine on the shelves in the school nurse’s office.

In the letter, the director was respectfully asking the parents to not send their sick child to school because there is nothing the school can do for them. Instead of calling into school as most parents in the United States are asked to do if their child is sick and misses class, the director was asking the parents to send a note with the child when they return. She does not ask them to call because if the parents do not have a phone plan, they must go to a corner store and pay for the number of minutes they wish to use on their phone. Calling the school for their sick child would mean that the parents would have to spend money to call in. Yet, if the parents are not calling when the child is sick, the teachers have no way of knowing who will show up and that complicates lesson plans; particularly when teachers only have one or two classes of 35 minutes per week with each section of students.

Among other challenges, the director was telling us that there are 40 weeks of school but that does not mean the teachers are allowed to teach all 40 weeks. The teachers must make curriculum that is flexible because if it rains for three days straight the ministry of education will call and cancel classes for a week. If there is an accident on the highway the ministry of education may cancel classes for the day. Out of the 40 weeks that teachers are supposed to prepare to teach, the director told us that they could be left with anywhere between 30 and 35 teachable weeks. This is not counting the school holidays already built into the academic calendar. She told us, “Necesitamos jugar con lo que hay” meaning, we have to play with what there is. She does not have any other option. For all that she is juggling, she seems to be doing the best she can and adapts rules and regulations as she can to best suite the students and their needs. The younger students who come in the morning were leaving school at 12:15 and as they walked to the bus stop, they would walk by the older students who were arriving for their afternoon classes. The two groups would get into fights and she had to send many students to the clinic for stitches, broken noses, and black eyes. Responding to this situation, the director changed the times when the young students would leave and the older students would arrive to avoid such conflicts. For a more sustainable program, she said that issues requiring creativity and patience such as these would have to be considered. The program has to be thoughtful and flexible because no one ever knows how many weeks or how many children will show up and there is no way to make that number constant.

The director told me that she is open to continuing a program and that she would hope to have it become one of the regular classes so that every week for the entire year each section would have one 35 minute period about sexual health education. She told us that she was very content with the workshops we had been giving and thought that our message reached the students as they were coming to her and telling her what they were learning and that they wanted more workshops. As valuable as she thought the workshops were, she does not have the people or the resources to fund a class such as ours. If we wanted to make it sustainable she said that we would have to find the funding but that she could create the openings in the class schedule and could find us classroom space; we just needed to supply to the team of people and the materials.

I asked her what she would hope the workshops would focus on. She would like to see classes that taught values. Whatever values the students are learning at home, she says that in her school she hopes to reinforce or teach the students about respect, honesty, responsibility, kindness, and justice. More than anything she would hope that we could create classes that would teach students that they should try to talk to their parents. Even if this “confianza en los padres” has not yet been established, she thinks that this is a key to the students being more successful in all aspects of their lives. Even if they disagree with their parents’ values, the dialogue is what she is aiming to create.

If I am going to try to build a program that works for this school, I will need to create a 3-year curriculum for students starting from the primary level until the tertiary level when they graduate. The curriculum will have to be flexible and because there will be more time there is more opportunity to deal with issues that affect adolescents, particularly those here at INVAL. There is room to talk more in depth about sexuality, sexually transmitted infections, drugs, alcohol, how to talk to your partner or parents about certain topics, how to advocate for yourself, and recognize how each student engages in a situation when they feel vulnerable so they can better equip themselves with tools to communicate what they need. While I do not think I can complete all of this within the next two days, I will be turning in a book of the curriculum that we used so that if the Director has another month where a few teachers are suspended she can use these activities. I am also answering every question that the students put in the anonymous question box and will be giving those responses to her with copies for the students. We are buying a box and putting it in the school so that students can keep asking their questions and continue this dialogue with the teachers and directors at INVAL. The curriculum is a long-term goal that I hope to finish and send to the director in the next coming months.

Apart from INVAL, one of the women teaching with me, Alex, is going to be working in Xela. Xela is a town about three hours from Antigua with a larger indigenous population. Alex used to work in a hospital there and is friends with some of the community health workers. One of these coordinators for the health workers there, Carmen, found out what Alex was doing with me at INVAL and asked if she would bring her the curriculum we created. Carmen hopes to translate the curriculum into different indigenous languages so that the community health workers in Xela can integrate this information into their work.

This project is nothing like I thought it was going to be and all that I hoped it would end up like. While it would be fulfilling to be able to train the students so they could take over the sexual health education classes, recognizing what we have accomplished thus far is still gratifying. There are small, sustainable aspects of the project. We have an email for the students to reach us with their questions. We have started a dialogue among the students about how to talk about delicate issues that have serious consequences, such as sex. With the interest coming from the students and the question box that we will put in the school, hopefully the students will continue asking questions and the Director will respond and continue that dialogue. INVAL will have a version of all of the curriculum and activities that we used, in case they choose to continue this condensed version of sexual health education. This curriculum is also going to be translated into indigenous languages to be used by community health workers in Xela. Every month I will be sending condoms from the United States to Andrea’s restaurant so that the students can come and take them when they need them, anonymously and while they are there, they can pick up a pamphlet with information about how to care for and protect themselves sexually. I am going to be working on a long-term curriculum for INVAL and lastly, I will create a plan so that other students who are interested can come to Antigua and know what they need in order to continue with the program we have started. The program is not running itself and continuing without us when we leave per se but in small ways, it is continuing and with that I feel like it has been a success.

Alexandra Kamler
Antigua, Guatemala

This past week, the Prensa Libre, one of the popular newspapers here in Antigua, came out with an article stating that the government’s priority should be on sexual health education. The author, Alberto Ramírez E., covered the Dinámica Actual y Futura de la Población conference that took place this year with a group of Guatemalan scientists. The conference aimed to discuss the population growth in Guatemala and the impact this growth has on the country. In covering the results of the conference, Ramírez reported that activities such as deforestation, with an increasing population, is negatively affecting the environment and was shown as the cause of the deteriorating biosphere (Prensa Libre, 27 de Julio). Ramírez, reporting from the conference, explained that the deforestation is the principal cause of the deterioration of the environment and is related to the natural disasters the country has experienced. To reduce the deterioration of the environment, Rodolfo Espinoza, the representative of the Fondo de Población de las Naciones Unidas, commented that it is necessary to talk about population control through avenues such as sexual health education. Right now Guatemala’s population growth is greater than the country’s rate of production. The country cannot create enough jobs to provide opportunities for all of the people it must support. Espinoza explained that politics alone cannot create a balance for this difference; he concluded that this imbalance is the reason for why there are so many young people living without opportunities to study or to work.

For such a respected newspaper to come out with an article that links the future success of the country to population control is impressive, particularly in such a religious country. In connecting population control, that has a historically negative connotation in Guatemala, with sexual health education the ‘population control’ then becomes something that is about learning and understanding one’s own options for one’s own life rather than something mandated and violently enforced by the government. It almost seems that through using the medium of sexual health education, the goal of reducing the population is looked at as an opportunity. While sexual health education cannot solve the deeply rooted problems of corruption and class divide, I do think that sexual health education at the very least could provide people with a sense of agency over their own bodies and their own lives. Recognizing the importance of sexual health education and the connection it has to other issues such as protecting the environment, the economy, the health of the population and the future opportunities for Guatemala’s youth is extremely exciting for me. Reporting that the number one priority this conference came up with to support the people of Guatemala is to create programs and workshops that Alex, Andrea, and I are already conducting!

I took the news article to the Director that morning, who had not yet read it but said she would look at it and get back to me with comments the next day. That next day she had a meeting in Guatemala City and the next day I found out I had parasites so I could not really teach for 70 minutes straight. This coming week I will sit down with her and discuss the implications for this article as it relates to the workshops we are conducting and possible ways to continue this new program. I think if built upon and continued in a smart manner, having a sexual health program already up and running in INVAL could potentially be a great source of pride for the Director. INVAL has a terrible reputation for teaching kids from lower socio economic class and providing them with a sub-par education. I think that if the director assumed a bit more responsibility with the project we are conducting she could take more credit and this project could be the start of a change in reputation for this seemingly failing school. The opportunity to start something with the momentum from the article in the newspaper could look extremely favorable if the Director could help us keep it going. Granted, one sexual health program is not going to make all the students pass nor go onto university but it could potentially make INVAL, the largest public high school in Antigua, a school that others look to in terms of organizing sexual health education programs and that is exciting.

Since we have been at the school there are small changes that are starting to occur. When we first walked into INVAL, there was a poster from a health organization detailing the signs of a boyfriend that is mistreating a girlfriend. On our second week as I walked into the school I noticed a new poster, this one showed the different methods of contraception including the intra-uterine device, the birth control pill, and the condom. The following week there was a poster about how to actually put the condom on, with diagrams! This past week one of the teachers whom I had never been formally introduced to, walked into the classroom to ask us if we gave the workshops at other high schools and if so, were any of them private. This teacher, Mateo, told us that he had been hearing about what we were doing from the students. He said he works with a group of adolescents in a private high school and the interest in having a workshop like ours is extremely high. Unfortunately, we told him that as of yet we only work at INVAL. I told him that if he is interested, I am going to put a book together of the curriculum, and all of the activities and necessary materials so that anyone who has interest could technically read the workshop designs and know exactly what to say and how long each activity should take. Then the following day the director brought me into her office and we went over the remaining sections that still needed to have the second workshop. She told me that one class had not had any workshop with us and they were coming to her asking when they could have it, why they had not had it yet and to make sure they could have both workshops before we left. I had a suspicion the students were enjoying the workshops because they always seemed happy to see us, were relatively attentive in class and stayed after to ask questions. However, when I am teaching the workshop with Alex and Andrea it is hard to say if the students truly think it is valuable or not. This was a gratifying moment because it was the first time that the director’s mood visibly changed towards me, to one of more acceptance and openness with how we could possibly continue with the project. I had brought up ideas about creating a peer resources group and training a group of teachers and students so that if there was ever a time again where teachers were suspended, the students could facilitate the workshops. The director had never seemed too keen on the idea before. Now, that there was this momentum and energy coming from the students asking if they could stay after school for more workshops, and wondering when they could receive the second workshop I felt like our work was all coming together. This was the kind of feedback I had hoped to achieve when we started this project because I think it is the most powerful.

We are finishing up our final days at INVAL and I am trying to figure out ways to make this project somewhat sustainable. I have an email so any student can email me at saludfamiliargt@gmail.com with a sexual health education question and I will do my best to provide them with an accurate, responsible answer. Teachers, directors, etc can also email me with questions regarding starting projects in their own communities. I am compiling all of the curriculum and activities into a book to give to different people that have helped me through this project as well as those who I think could use and adapt the activities to make them appropriate for their own communities. Next week I am going to talk with the Director and ask her if she is truly interested in continuing this project and what that would entail.
In the future, if I was going to turn this project into a study I would have a way to track each student and see how many ended up becoming parents before they actively chose to be, and track those results against another high school in the same area where we did not give the classes. Then I could theoretically use the statistics that are already in place regarding how many kids from this area are malnourished, how many live in poverty, how many are unemployed, maternal and infant mortality, etc. This would be to see what difference I could draw, if any, these classes made in terms of the resources the unplanned pregnancies take up as well as the impact on the economy. One of the difficult aspects of tracking people such as the kids from INVAL is that if they were not born in a hospital, if they change cell phone numbers, if their families move, then we lose track of them and how they are doing. If I were to someday come back and conduct a study whose idea stemmed from this project with INVAL I would need to work more closely with people from the community like I had started to when I first came down to Antigua when I thought I was going to create health workshops with community groups.

Putting the long-term study goals aside, knowing how much money it takes to live down here and conduct the classes, what I can do is create a plan so that interested students could apply for grants, or work with organizations who could raise money so that they could come down and conduct the classes that we have already started. I have recorded every purchase I have made so that I can write up a report saying with this amount of money, this is how many kids you can provide basic sexual health education to in this amount of time. It seems that there are many students who want to do something that they feel is worthwhile and fulfilling; they just falter in the contact person or an organization in a foreign country. With my experience, I could be that contact person and suggest the organization, INVAL. Using this experience, I will write something of a guidebook telling the interested volunteer all they need to know as well as the logistics. It will include suggestions on modestly priced, safe housing with a family who takes in travelers and is close to the central park, where to catch the bus, where to get off, how much bus fare costs, how to get to the director’s office, what they need to bring to school each day, where to find all of the supplies, what they need to say and how they will break down each class, and who they can talk to in Antigua if they want to be able to talk with someone who has already gone through this experience.

While I cannot raise the money to fund the continuation of the project, I do think there are many young people interested in coming and working in a school teaching sexual health education. With this experience I think creating the materials necessary so interested volunteers or community members can continue the classes is my best chance at trying to make this small program we have started sustainable.

Alexandra Kamler
Antigua, Guatemala

These past few weeks we have been giving the second part of our two part workshops to the students at INVAL. This workshop builds off of the basic information the students learned in the first workshop about the parts of the bodies, reproductive systems, how they function, and why they’re important. These classes are more engaging for the students because most of the class is demonstrations and activities. We start with an exercise brainstorming about the changes that occur during puberty and then discuss why and how these changes occur. We review menstruation with drawings on the board and then review what tampons and pads are, and how they work. A quick demonstration with a tampon and water from the cap of a water bottle to show how the absorption works always fascinates the students. Using tampons in Guatemala is rather uncommon and none of the students had ever seen exactly how a tampon absorbs liquid. Before I take out the tampon from its wrapper, I hold it up and ask the students to name what I am holding. The most common answer is “condom”. Most of these students do not have ready access to the Internet and are lucky if they have televisions in their homes. For teens in the United States, if they have watched television chances are they have seen a tampon commercial and could most likely recognize one if they saw a teacher holding it up. The inundation of information from the media that happens to children in the United States is not happening here for this particular group of students who make up the lower socio economic class of Antigua. Once we review that no in fact this long plastic tube is a tampon and not a condom, we go on to cover how a woman becomes pregnant, the ways to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. We then pass around birth control pills so the students can recognize what a package would look like if they went to a pharmacy to buy a pack, and discuss how the hormones protect a woman from becoming pregnant.

Our workshops take place in the library. The library is a large room filled with desks and a dry erase board at the front. The books that one would expect to find in a library are locked away behind a door where the students cannot access them. I have never seen a librarian, all the books have dust on them and I am not sure if the students are allowed to check them out. I have never seen a student hold one of the books. The other day one of the students asked me what all of the books were for. On either side of the room, there are two walls of windows. On one side, the windows that open an inch or two look over a grassy area. On the other side of the room, the windows, which begin at about waist height and go upwards towards the ceiling look onto the hallway. Usually by the time Alex, Andrea, and I have covered the different methods of birth control and how they work there are three to four teachers standing, peering into the classroom. The first time this happened I went outside to ask if the teachers would like to come in and sit in on the class to hear what we were discussing. They all replied in a hurried fashion and thanked me but were just as happy watching from the outside.

Every morning, after we discuss the different methods to prevent pregnancy, the hormone and the physical barrier methods, we take out the two plastic penis models I bought in a sex shop in Guatemala City. The store did not have two models of the same color so one is a tissue color and the other is fluorescent, it glows in the dark. While I also find this somewhat amusing, the students act as if one of us has just flashed the class. Andrea was trying to explain what the cultural equivalent of having these two models present in the class, let alone asking the students to use them to put condoms on is. In her explanation she helped me remember that these kids have never had their parents talk to them about sex, about how to care for themselves, let alone the correct steps to put a condom on and how to take it off correctly. Culturally, Andrea said it would be something of similar shock value if I were to go into a public high school in New York and put on a porn video. Granted, what we are doing in INVAL is extremely different and the purpose/benefits of the workshops are profoundly different than just showing porn. However, that is the supposed equivalent shock value for this particular group of students. Now by this time, we have about four or five teachers, usually male, standing outside peering into the classroom. To finish out the second workshop we demonstrate, using the models, how to put on and take off a condom correctly. Then we have each student take a male condom, the model, and a paper towel and show us the correct steps, while telling us what they are doing as they are doing it, to check if the condom is still able to be used, how to take it out of the package without damaging it, how to put it on, and how to take it off of the model correctly.

From conversations with the students, I have learned that very few people want to go to the pharmacy or the clinic to talk to a pharmacist or doctor and see if they have a sexually transmitted infection. Just the other day I went into a pharmacy, as I do every morning, to buy two big boxes of condoms- about 90 condoms total depending on how many classes I am teaching that morning. As I was waiting for the pharmacist to go get the boxes, I saw about three or four pharmacists huddle together behind the racks of medicine and start laughing about the condoms I was about to buy. I am the one teaching the sexual health education class and that even made me feel a bit uncomfortable. Imagine how uncomfortable a kid would feel if they went in and wanted to ask a question about how to use a condom, or what lubricant is. After the pharmacist returned, still with a grin on his face, I asked whether he tells the adolescents who come into the pharmacy how to use a condom correctly or if he passes out a pamphlet to ensure they know how to protect themselves. He told me that if they are coming in to buy a condom then they already know how to use it. I recognize that pharmacists do not do that in the United States either, but I still do not think it would hurt to pass out a pamphlet or train the pharmacists so they can learn how to talk about protecting oneself without laughing. I tried another pharmacy in Antigua and that morning I did not explain that I was teaching sexual health education and that is why I was buying the condoms. Before giving me the boxes, the pharmacist asked me what exactly my job was, implying that I might be working nights on the next corner and that’s why I needed so many condoms. It was comical that he thought a gringa is making so much money as a prostitute she has decided to use 80 condoms per night. The whole interaction was wild.

Here in Antigua, people often do not go to the doctor because it is expensive and so they go to the pharmacist, explain their symptoms and the pharmacist provides the medicine they think the sick person should take to recuperate. In the United States, this is usually the role of the doctor. So, if the pharmacist is what the doctor is in the United States, if adolescents come into a pharmacy the pharmacists should be trained on the issues that may be affecting adolescents and should know how to begin a dialogue so that the adolescent feels a bit more comfortable with their purchase of condoms.
Now, back to the classroom. Each student takes a turn as Alex and I go around ensuring and correcting their mistakes as they open, put on, and take off the condom. The 35 sixteen-year-old boys are waiting, making jokes as most adolescent boys would when you show up with a glow in the dark model penis and tell them to put a condom on it. However, when it is their turn, their hands begin to shake and they have difficulty opening the packet. They begin to sweat and all the other boys are silent until they are able to open the package and take out the condom. After the boy complete ONE of the steps correctly, all the boys applaud, and they quickly conclude that he is a sexual expert and because of all of his experience, he can open the condom. This happens almost every time, with almost every boy. We are thankful for those, although they are few, adolescent boys who are not as aggressive and crass about the activity. Remember that INVAL used to be a boys public school but has since turned into co-ed so in each class there are around 3-7 girls. When we get to the girls, they turn squeamish not wanting to touch the condom. The other day we had three girls who refused to do the activity in front of the boys. While I forget this dynamic when I am at the front of the class, I am quickly reminded as the boys all get very quiet, watching which girl can put the condom on correctly. If she completes all of the steps then she has obviously had a lot of experience, if she cannot then there are jokes. Recognizing that this is not the point of the exercise, we had the three girls stay after class, and forced the boys to step away from the windows so that the girls could do the exercise without feeling that pressure.

Looking about what we are doing here at INVAL, I wonder what the Director thinks of it all. She has never walked into our classroom to see what we are teaching. Sure, she glanced over the first few pages of the outlined curriculum but she does not really know what we are teaching her students. No teacher has ever come in to monitor us or evaluate our workshops. Whenever she asks to speak with me, she calls me from out in the hallway. She has never stepped foot into our classroom, not even before we begin teaching. I began to wonder why. I almost started to feel as though she was not interested. Then I realized that perhaps she recognizes the importance of this workshop, wants to continue being able to give it to her students but politically cannot openly support everything that we are bringing to this workshop, penis models and all. By never stepping foot in the classroom, or sitting in on a workshop she can maintain a supposed ignorance about what is going on. If someone is upset about our workshops and come to her, demanding to know how she could have let something like this happen she can still claim that she was unaware. While it is unfortunate that she cannot fully embrace our classes, I do think that is strategic of her to work with us in this manner. The only thing I foresee being a problem is if I try to make this a sustainable program for other students who have interest in continuing our workshops with future classes. The director will be forced to take on a bit more responsibility in regards to what is being taught. At least it seems she would have to be aware of what we are teaching. And so, until next time, I will be teaching and thinking about ways to keep this program we have started sustainable and under the radar until the Director can fully support what we are teaching.

Alexandra Kamler
Antigua, Guatemala

Last time I wrote, I had just sent the director of INVAL, Magali Rosales Garcia the sexual health curriculum that Alex, Andrea, and I had created for the students. On Monday I sent it, on Tuesday I followed up, and on Wednesday when I had yet to hear anything, we went to INVAL to speak with the director. It seems much easier to just walk in and ask to speak with a director of a high school here than it would be in the United States. Appointments do not seem as necessary and email correspondence has not proven to be the best method of communication. Showing up seems to work best. Magali apologized for not returning our emails; she was swamped with restructuring classes. Four of her teachers were suspended. INVAL is a public school, funded by the government. Classes are separated in two parts, the morning classes, and afternoon classes. Students either attend classes in the morning or afternoon. There are 16 sections of students that attend morning classes. There are between 25 and 50 students in each class. Each day the students attending the morning classes have 8 classes of 35 minutes each. They start their days at 7:30 and end at 12:30. Magali told us that she had 4 teachers suspended; there are 4 class slots where she does not have anything for her students to do. There are not sufficient resources or number of teachers to fill the slots. How perfect we just happened to want to do a project.

After glancing over the curriculum, Magali informed us that none of this information would be new to her students but she didn’t see any reason why we should not do this project. She told us that APROFAM had already visited the students and given them workshops on sexual health and so we should not go into the classroom thinking the students were ignorant about this information or that they were ill informed. Rather, they were already well educated on all of these topics. Magali finished the meeting letting us know that our first class would be the following morning at 7:30 a.m. and we would be teaching students between the ages of 11 and 18. She also mentioned we should be teaching all the students the same information but to make sure it is age appropriate. Sure, not a problem Director.
On Thursday Alex, Andrea, and I arrived at 6:45 a.m. with two huge water jugs full of smoothies, 300 ham and cheese sandwiches, and 15 bags of cookies. That day we taught straight from 7:30 through 12:30 and saw 4 different classes, each for 2 sections of 35 minutes each. Our first class with each section starts slow as we do an activity to get to know each other and then move on to go through the parts and functions of the reproductive systems of males and females. We go over the changes that occur during puberty, giving particular attention to what happens during menstruation, and then we move on to how a woman gets pregnant and an activity that has to do with common myths regarding pregnancy prevention. We have a question box where each student is requested to write something to put in the box. It is anonymous and if we have time, we read through and answer the questions. If our time is up, we write up responses that night and print out sheets for the students to take the next day.

To the director’s surprise, the students are not as well informed as she had once thought. I remember first having sexual health classes in the third grade, then again in the sixth and in my high school, we had a human development class. I am still learning all there is about sexual health so it is understandable that the students do not remember every detail from the 15-minute presentation by APROFAM (Association for the well-being of the family in Guatemala) they had once last year. Some say that a person has to learn something six times before they really grasp onto the information.
The students engage with us and seem extremely open to the information that we are presenting. All the students have a lot of questions, apart from the 13-year-old boys who look more like seven-year-old boys and sit in silence for the first twenty minutes of the class with eyes wide and mouths open as we go over the anatomically correct pictures of the female and male reproductive systems. The students seem to have heard many popular phrases or names of diseases and myths from friends, family, and the media but are not exactly sure what they all mean when asked about them later on. We joke and cover the information, answering questions along the way hoping to clarify the different options students have in regards to protecting themselves if they choose to have sexual relationships. We pass out snacks and ask them to call us by our first names, hoping to make it a more informal and comfortable atmosphere. As the students file out of the door to say goodbye, kissing us on the cheek, one student stays behind and then another. The first asks me what the likelihood is that he has HIV if his mother has something called AIDS. He remembered us talking about the relationship between the two earlier in class and wants to know more. Another girl lags behind and waits for me to finish answering his questions before she asks me how she can give herself an abortion.

And suddenly the class is no longer as light-hearted. It has stopped being a lesson of hypothetical situations and theoretical ways in which to care for yourself. I am teaching sexual health education in a catholic country where abortion is illegal and condoms are not easily accessible, particularly for adolescents who feel ashamed to go in and ask the pharmacist who just so happens to know everyone in their community. These kids attend a school where the teachers are no shows and where I can have them for another 35-minute section if we have more information to cover. No, no math today- more sexual health education, the math teacher is sick. Apparently, the kids that attend this school are lucky to be there and most likely will start working after they graduate. Their families do not have the funds to pay for the 2 years of specialized school that comes after colegio and before the University. Many factors are just collapsing onto each other. It suddenly seems ironic that I am trying to teach these students how to care for themselves in a school that does not have potable water for them to drink. The government also thought that a good budget cut was toilet paper so for the 13 year old girl who just got her period, she better hope that her friends brought packets with them for her to use. When Alex and I walk around the school we see more people working in the office than in the classrooms and I wonder what is going on. INVAL is apparently one of the largest public institutes for kids in Guatemala. Since our teaching started, I have learned that looking at health, as a human right is necessary, particularly in finding ways to have information regarding health accessible to young people. I also think that as important as I believe sexual health to be in promoting and providing information so students can choose the options they feel are best for their own lives, there are many foundational aspects that need to be looked at in regards to health in this high school before we get to condoms and spermicide. For example, there needs to be soap in the bathroom, toilet paper, and drinking water. When I think of NYU these are the very basic items that the school supplies. But on the other hand, these students are lucky in the grander scheme of things. They get to attend school. They are not working in the dump where landslides kill people after heavy rains and vulture’s circles high above. These kids do not have to clothe every part of their body to shield it from the sun; sunglasses to protect their eyes from particles of trash, bandanas over their nose and mouth so they do not breath in the feces wrapped in toilet paper. The kids in INVAL most likely have at least one family member and can afford to not work in the morning. So relatively speaking in relation to the other children their age, who are only an hour bus ride away working in the dump, the students of INVAL are lucky to get anything. However, this is obviously problematic. This is exactly the mentality that permits a government to get away with not paying its teachers, which in turn makes them not want to show up which clearly affects the quality of education that the students receive. I am learning a lot about the students and even more about the interconnectedness of the government, economy, education, and health of the people of Guatemala. I am trying to unpack it all, understand how the different parts function, and depend on one another more clearly. And until the suspended teachers return to teach, Alex, Andrea, and I will be at INVAL learning and answering questions from the ‘anonymous questions box.’.

Alexandra Kamler
Antigua, Guatemala

On the plane to Guatemala City, I kept looking around and noticed the old women. Women with summery dresses that skimmed right past their knees, sensible black close toed shoed and long beautiful black hair. Recognizing the history of Guatemala I couldn’t help but think about all that those women had seen and experienced and here they still were, humble and gracious as they told me about their lives. One of the challenging aspects of learning about the culture in Guatemala is that one learns most from that which goes unsaid. For me this takes a bit longer to grasp because I am looking for the gaps and listening for the silences.

I came to Guatemala with the understanding that I would fit into an organization, smoothly transition and quickly learn from and work with the community to create sexual health education classes. However, I soon discovered that Orís’ dedication to serving the community was the very factor that forced the director, Andrea España Marmol to close its doors. Class status runs deep in Antigua and having indigenous women and patrons from other socioeconomic strata come into Orís and sell their wares threatened the landlord’s ambition to keep Orís and the surrounding neighborhood a “high-class” area.
Since Orís will not be able to open it’s doors for a bit of time, two women with whom I have worked on different health projects in Latin America who had previous work experience in Guatemala came down and helped me assemble a team of people from the community I would work with. Together our group, which is almost exclusively Guatemalan, except for myself and a health worker, is restructuring the sexual health education curriculum that I came with so that it functions for the group of teenagers here in Antigua that we will be teaching it to. During one of our meetings, Lucre and Andrea informed me that most of the girls they know are unaware as to what exactly is happening to their body when they go through menstruation. José, the firefighter working with us, recounted stories about delivering babies to girls who were only 12 years old themselves. In recognizing this reality, Alex and myself, the two who are not from Guatemala had to restructure the way in which we think about what being a 12 year old girl means as we strove to create curriculum that would appropriately and responsibly deliver information about pregnancy prevention. We are trying to be aware of the assumptions Alex and I come with regarding what we think the students’ base knowledge about their body is. So we began reforming the curriculum and are starting with the very basics; body parts, reproductive systems, names, functions etc.

This upcoming week I will be training the group on how we are going to present this workshop as we are scheduled to begin teaching in the classroom at the end of the week. We are going to a high school in Antigua called INVAL, which stands for Instituto Normal para Varones ‘Antonio Larrazabal.’ Our group is made up of firefighters, paramedics, health workers, community leaders, and students. We are trying to create a curriculum that could potentially be given to any teacher in the school so that it can be used if he/she so desires in her classroom. We will be holding training sessions for teachers interested in getting the curriculum so that the ideas and activities are understood clearly. We also intend to train students that are interested in the workshop so that they can, if they desire, be a student who is well versed on issues relating to sexual health. We are hoping that they can serve as a resource for other students who may feel more comfortable asking a peer rather than a counselor or teacher once we have finished the workshop. However, if students do have questions we have set up an email account so that no matter where any of us are around the globe the students can ask questions without the shame or intimidation that often accompanies talking about issues as delicate as one’s own sexuality, doubts, and how to care for oneself with someone face to face.

So far, I am not exactly ‘fitting into’ an organization as I had previously thought. Rather, I seem to be working with community leaders and interested parties in designing and implementing curriculum for high school students and teachers. When Orís re-opens we are going to start the workshops that I had originally thought I would conduct. These workshops will be for adolescents, women, men and couples regarding the different aspects of caring for yourself in ways that are healthy and work for each person’s particular context. The community center aspect of Orís will allow a space for the community, apart from the workshops, to come and talk about issues that may be difficult to talk about with others in their community. But all that will come later. Right now, we are primarily focusing on the curriculum and our meeting when we propose it to the Director of INVAL on Monday. Wish us luck!

Saludos y abrazos de Guate,
Alexandra Kamler