c. 2000 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) Like most 15-year-olds, Mashapa Machaba never talked to his parents about sex.
School, yes. His future, yes. But condoms? AIDS?
“I could never have those types of discussions with my parents,” said Machaba.
But he is having those discussions now, and not just with his parents.
As one of three hosts of the South African television series S’camto (or “Talk”), Machaba has interviewed dozens of South African teen-agers about sex, relationships and related topics.
Hosted on a rotating basis by 15 young people who traveled across the country videotaping candid conversations with their peers about sexuality, S’camto is part of an AIDS awareness campaign for South African teen-agers called loveLife.
The campaign promotes its message on television and radio using entertainment and candid talk about sexuality and love _ mostly from young people who express their own views on the subjects and encourage their peers to do the same with their parents.
Machaba said he has learned just as much as his audience while working with S’camto, particularly since the show broadcast the story of an HIV-positive 17-year-old girl who became infected the first time she had sex.
“I’m definitely more aware of AIDS now,” said Machaba. “I take life more seriously than before because I know what can happen out there if I’m not careful.”
What has happened in his country is heart-wrenching.
South Africans are on the front line of an AIDS epidemic that is expected to claim some 3 million lives worldwide this year and has already taken about 22 million in the past two decades, according to a United Nations report released Tuesday (Nov. 28).
While Uganda has been a success story with infection rates dropping about 7 percent in the past decade, some 20 percent _ 4.2 million _ of South Africans are infected with the HIV virus. About 50,000 South African children are infected with the disease each year, according to some estimates, while thousands more have lost one or both parents to the disease.
South Africans are not alone.
Some 5.8 million South and Southeast Asians are infected with the virus, and about 3.7 million people are infected in India.
In Russia, the number of new HIV infections this year has more than doubled since last year _ from 130,000 to 300,000.
Of the estimated 5.3 million new HIV infections this year, some 1.5 million occurred in industrialized countries.
Though the high cost of anti-AIDS medication is outside the reach of many impoverished South Africans and others around the world, a glimmer of hope arrived on Friday (Dec. 1), the 13th annual World AIDS Day. The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. struck a deal with the South African government to provide a free two-year supply of the drug anti-fungal medication Diflucan to HIV/AIDS patients in the nation’s public health system.
Marking World AIDS Day in the United States (where some 700,000 people are living with HIV/AIDS), President Clinton convened a summit of world religious leaders in Washington, D.C., to talk about the faith community’s role in combatting AIDS.
At its headquarters in New York City, the United Nations will mark the day with an AIDS awareness forum at which Machaba and other loveLife participants will testify to the success of their own efforts.
Generating honest and open discussion about HIV/AIDS is crucial to stifling the disease in South Africa and abroad, said Joel Makitla, who will join Machaba in representing loveLife at the forum.
“We haven’t talked about these things for a long time, and that has been a big part of the problem,” said Makitla, a manager of a loveLife youth center near Johannesburg. “People will never become educated about how to protect themselves unless we start talking.”
And young people in South Africa are eager to talk. A 24-hour toll-free sexual health help line that loveLife began in September of last year averages more than 70,000 calls per month.
“Young people are getting more comfortable talking about their relationships and sex and HIV/AIDS,” said Makitla. “At first, there were challenges in the community because people were not ready to talk about issues of sexuality and gender. But now we see it happening.”
Not just among young people, either, said Judi Nwokedi, national media director for loveLife.
“We can see a change also in the attitude of South African parents,” said Nwokedi. “In the past, they realized sex education was a must, but they were able to get away with not talking about it much. Now, the severity of the problem is bringing a change in their attitude _ they realize they cannot be silent anymore.”
But that realization is increasingly lost outside of poverty-stricken countries. The U.N. report on AIDS detected a growing complacency about the issue among the world’s wealthiest nations, such as the United States, where the AIDS death rate has dropped in recent years.
That complacency could be one of the greatest hindrances to choking back the disease, Nwokedi said.
“Because America appears to have conquered HIV they cannot now forget about the rest of the world,” she said. “We are truly a global society, and what happens to one person in one part of the world affects everybody. We cannot afford to forget that.”
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