When I was about 7 years old my mother warned me never to use another person’s razor blade to sharpen my pencil at school (back then, pencil sharpeners were uncommon). She said “if it cuts you, you will get sick and die.” That was my first of many encounters with HIV/AIDS awareness education. In Junior High, we were once shown a documentary about AIDS and the devastation it was causing all over Africa. We saw uncensored clips of people with genital herpes, syphilis, gonorrhea, and a host of other diseases. As I sit here, I can still remember all the horrible things I saw that day. However, there was something very interesting about that documentary. It opened with a man and a woman passionately kissing and tearing the clothes off each other. By the end of the documentary however, the message (not “use a condom”, but “abstinence”) was crystal clear. Today, the message is quite different; just a few meters from my church is a billboard with “use a condom” written boldly over it. The letters in the “use a condom” were formed from black stick figures having different kinds of sex. When I saw that billboard, I was saddened, because apart from the fact that it was too close to my church, after only 6 years, the message had gradually changed from “abstain” to “use a condom.” I asked myself, “Are they that desperate?” Sitting here today I realize that though at that time, I didn’t know that in Ghana an estimated 85% of all HIV infections occurred through heterosexual relationships1, it was from that documentary that I got the solid impression that “if you have sex before you marry, you will get AIDS”.
I carried this impression with me to high school, where I enrolled as a science student (that is, aside the core courses, I pursued 3 straight years of biology, physics, chemistry and math). Strangely enough, if not for this class, I wouldn’t have realized that throughout my high school biology curriculum, HIV/AIDS was only mentioned in a table of viral diseases under the topic “Human ecology and health.” For the record, we never got to that topic. However, through my high school, I got the chance to attend an HIV/AIDS workshop. I got in because the teacher in charge knew me. After I got in, a friend and I, the only 2 participants, had to literally comb the school for 4 other people who were interested in attending the workshop. During the workshop, there was this particular resource person with whom we had so much fun. How she was able to get a bunch of 17 year olds playing and dancing around like nursery children, I don’t know, but I enjoyed every bit of it. When we got down to business, she told us that she had HIV. When I heard that, I became very sad because she was so beautifully young…Would I have played with her if I had known she had HIV? I don’t know. However from that day onwards, I knew that it was true; AIDS had come, but it wasn’t only in Kenya, Nigeria or South Africa; it was in Ghana too.