My pride and joy

My funders: Ipas (doesn't really stand for anything, might have at one time? website: http://www.ipas.org/Index.aspx) is an international NGO that promotes sexual and reproductive health and rights, with a large focus on abortion.  Their headquarters are in North Carolina, but they have outposts all over the world, from the Americas to Asia to Africa.  They have five outposts in Africa, including one in South Africa, based in Jo'burg.  Their work includes research, training, and advocacy, among other things.  They conduct research about the above mentioned issues, including rates of teenage pregnancy, contraception use, and unsafe abortions, making them a great resource.  They train health care professionals in providing safe abortions and supply equipment as well.  Their advocacy is very broad and far reaching and covers all the above issues, and any related issues, including gender norms and violence.  For example, they are heavily involved in the activism surrounding women's health issues in the US right now in partnership with Planned Parenthood.  My experience with them ranges from them helping fund a Global Reproductive Health Week annually at my medical school to funding and helping facilitate programs here for educators and learners.  Their work extends all over the country.  For example, I have a Peace Corps friend who works at a woman's center in Mpumalanga (in the corner between Swazi and Moz) which they also help support.  Basically, they do some really cool stuff.

My project: A small grant to develop a program to support pregnant teenagers, which includes identifying pregnant learners earlier and making all options available, including termination (available during the first trimester by the woman's choice), as well as continuing with a safe and healthy pregnancy by getting early antenatal care.  We are also promoting keeping pregnant girls in school (which is required by law, but often they are pressured to leave) so that they can hopefully support themselves and their baby, providing them with some autonomy.  We have extended this program to target all at risk teenagers because so many of these issues are so closely linked.  One such issue we are particularly focusing on is gender based violence, being as pregnancy, violence, and HIV create a major triad, all of them leading to one another.  To address these issues we are implementing a mentoring program, made up of both educators and learners, to provide support and resources to learners within the school.

Part of our inspiration was Tim's program actually, Grassroot Soccer.  Grassroot Soccer is an activity-based HIV curriculum that supplements our formal health curriculum we provide in the units.  GRS is implemented in the schools by "coaches".  The "coaches" are recently graduated matrics from the community ("matric" is the final year of secondary school or high school that culminates with a large exam of the same name that a lot of their future depends on - the "coaches" all passed their matric).  We hired coaches as permanent positions at each school to teach the curriculum, and soon enough the learners started approaching the coaches with their problems and asking for help.  The coaches made us realize the learners need, appreciate and utilize having a trusted resource associated with Mpilonhle at their fingertips. 

Mpilonhle's mobile units rotate through each school once every 5 weeks on average, leaving a gap of time when the learners don't have access to a nurse or social worker.  This becomes an issue, especially in relation to time sensitive and crisis situations, such as pregnancy or violence.  While the coaches are great at their job, they are not trained as counselors, so we decided to create a more formal program, which now goes by the name PALS (Partnership for Adolescent Learner Support - yes, I came up with that, thank you very much).  The idea of the program is to create a permanent presence in the schools by training these ambassadors, more or less, who are available at school full time and will provide a bridge between the schools and the organization by having contact with the Mpilonhle staff 24-7.  So if they identify a vulnerable learner who needs to see a nurse or social worker, they can call us, and we will send the appropriate personnel within 24 hours.

We opted to have two layers, with the educators, who serve as trusted adults that have access to resources, including contact to the Mpilonhle services, and the learners themselves serving as peer counselors, because there are some issues adolescents just feel more comfortable talking to a peer about, as well as that the learners often have the best sense of what is going down at school.  We wanted to involve the members of the school community, in part because when we talked to them, they all spoke about these problems they are facing, and while they are very aware of them, they didn't know what to do about them, how to help, educators and learners alike.  They were very discouraged.  And so by including them we hope to give them the tools and resources to become involved, giving them some ownership over the problems and their solutions within their communities.

We just finished our first training of the educators, a three day workshop where we covered mentoring and counseling skills, sexual and reproductive rights, including abortion (facilitated by IPAS), mental health, abuse, drugs, and other vulnerabilities of adolescents, including physical, emotional, and socioeconomic.  And in my opinion, it was quite a success.  A quote from one of the satisfaction surveys: "The workshop was good and it helps me to accept and not judge people who have made abortions because they have their reasons".  I know that it might not sounds like much to a lot of us, but that, THAT is success here.  Woo!  Go team!

We will start training the learners (peer counselors) soon, which will be a two day workshop that includes some mentoring skills, as well as talking about gender issues and sexual and reproductive health and rights (again, with the help of IPAS), among other issues mentioned above.  Eventually, we also want these teams to help run awareness campaigns in their schools on such issues as pregnancy, gender-based violence, substance abuse, etc.

Woo!  Okay, I think that's about it.  Again, please let me know if you have any questions and/or comments.  Would love to hear from you all!