By Puja Awasthi
Jyoti Tiwari is a determined young woman on a mission to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS in India’s most populous state, where school teachers regularly burn text-books containing any reference to teenage sexuality.
Tiwari is an assistant teacher in a programme to train young women to spread the word about AIDS among the most deprived and backward communities in Uttar Pradesh, an intensely patriarchal state of over 16 million people.
Despite the state's great vulnerability to the virus, brought on by a tottering health care system, large-scale worker migration and a long porous border with Nepal, the issue is clothed in superstition and fed on misinformation.
The thousand-odd students in the fast-track residential programme called Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya (KGBV) are trained to use subtle techniques to overcome women’s reluctance to discuss sexual issues when they return to their villages and communities.
“I weave in my lessons with embroidery classes,” Tiwari said. “Between tips on matching threads and setting patterns, we talk of village gossip, of infidelity,
of sexual health.”
A needle prick could become the starting point for a discussion on sources of transmitting the HIV virus.
Local gossip about a man who leaves his wife for another woman can be turned into a lively debate about the physical and social benefits of monogamy, and extended to the need for women to be economically independent.
One of the students on the programme, Anita Kumari, admitted to having to overcome initial shyness in discussing sexual issues. “Before I would consider such discussions dirty,” she said. “But now I know better."
Another student, Nazia Maqdood, says she is glad to have the opportunity to be a leader of sorts in her community. “If women, who are most at risk, do not tackle this issue, who will,” she asks.
A similar conclusion was reached by the first-ever International Women’s Summit on HIV and AIDS held in Nairobi in July. A 10-point action plan focused on developing leadership among women to respond to HIV/AIDS and concluded with the message: "We can lead the change we wish to see in the world."
In their own little corners of the world Jyoti, Nazia and Anita are already leading that change.
Puja Awasthi is a journalist with India's 'The Sunday Indian'. This article is part of a series from alumni of the Thomson Reuters Foundation HIV/AIDS reporting course in Bangkok, 10-14 November. Any opinions are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
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