How does one get gonorrhea?

One day Jacob was complaining about one of his younger brothers. His brother was becoming more and more of a rebel. School was starting soon, and he wouldn't be returning to start his second year of junior high. He was refusing to go to his father's farm, and had essentially moved out of the family compound and was drifting around.

Jacob said his brother had been hanging out with this group that always sits under this tree on the side of the road pretty close to my house. This is characteristic of many social circles. Each has their own tree or open air shelter where friends come to gather everyday – and is also where we do most of our health sessions.

As we went about trying to determine which groups we wanted to meet with in our early efforts to try and offer informal health talks or income-generating opportunities, Jacob told me in passing that this particular group would be an excellent one to meet with. It wasn't until that one day that he was particularly upset, so we went to ask them to see if they would be interested in meeting with us.

Jacob told them what we do and asked if there was anything in particular they wanted to do, bringing up the family planning and sexual health mission. He expected this would be the primary direction of the group and that they would jump on it. Almost immediately, some of the guys, or kids, eluded to making sexual jokes in broken English about condoms and HIV – both demonstrating their English skills and knowledge of HIV and condoms. Their demeanor reminded me of something like the cool kids in high school.

Most teenagers are very respectful and carefully greet me because they're in my class. If a JHS girl sees me at the borehole, without hesitating she will take my can to the front of the line since the teachers have students fetch them water, and then fill my container too. I don't ever complain because the line is long. But these kids were different. They weren't following the status quo. As a result, the community labels them as misfits, if not troublemakers. After asking about them, people said they're all dropouts, a few of them live in their own house (a bachelor pad is very non-conforming, but impressive), they do drugs, chase girls at night and if any students start hanging out with them, they will also be convinced to drop out. Others said they will go to kayeyei, a migrant worker movement from the northern regions to larger cities in the south, especially Accra and Kumasi to seek work (I will post a blog about kayeyei, which means “carry the load” after an event we're planning next month). There was little positive feedback.

There was something intriguing about these teenagers. You could call them “at-risk” youth. They were easily too immature, or simply wouldn't care for the family planning talks we were doing with the adult groups. I didn't know where to start, but knew we had to learn more about them before deciding any direction. So, we looked at the first plan of a gender transformation training manual and simplified it to under-the-tree grade.

Jacob and our other friend Jacob (who we'll call Yakubu – the Dagbanli equivalent of Jacob) and I met them on a Friday night at 8 p.m. It was a simple plan: read some statements and ask whether they agree or disagree with them, and then have them explain themselves. It's intended to start identifying gender issues and roles. Some were, “It is easier to be a man than a woman,” “A real man has many sex partners even after he's married,” “You're not a man until you have sex,” “Women shouldn't complain to their husbands,” and “Only men should resolve community issues,” among others like this. This English-Dagbanli blended discussion was good enough to turn into a long conversation about sex in the community, fielded mostly by Jacob and Yakubu, who translated every now and then to me but were clearly entertained by the discussion. Since the kids had some JHS education, some could speak basic English but anything they couldn't explain they should do in Dagbanli, since the point is discussion. From their responses and questions we learned that there's a lot of work to be done – essentially taking “women in the kitchen” jokes entirely seriously, with reasons to support themselves.

At one point Jacob and Yakubu stopped. They tell me that one of them was raising a particularly interesting comment I should hear. The conversation is very serious at this point and everyone is engaged. One of the kids says, in English, “I heard that you can get gonorrhea if you don't have sex.” After we asked where he got this from, the question was more about celibacy and whether it's physically harmful to abstain from sex. As we're sitting on the side of the road at night, I looked up at the stars and couldn't believe this was happening. I didn't know what to expect from this meeting, but was satisfied. We had a good survey of where to begin.

I suppose the sex element keeps them interested. You would be surprised by how open people are. Most of them agreed with the statements listed above. The energetic, joking teenagers became serious and engaged and kept us for an hour and a half. It doesn't take much time to notice the gender gap, but to see it directly expressed was a first.

So that's one of the groups we meet with. Weekly on Friday nights on the side of the road. After you get to know them, they're not so bad and just special in their own way. Working directly with people in these informal settings like these have become some of my favorite things to do here.

What's in your bicycle's basket?