Integrating Health Education in Early Grade Curriculum can Help Prevent STI among University Students

I was appalled by the level of the “I don’t-care-attitude” that most university students had towards health education when I served as the Project Coordinator to a student’s organization at the university. The giant student-led organization (membership of over 1200 students) had the mandate, among others, to sensitize the university and neighboring community about the means to prevent the contraction of HIV/AIDS, prevention of early pregnancies, community engagement among other issues. We organized weekly sessions to discuss selected topics, outside picnics for youth engagement, World AIDs Day celebrations and free HIV/AIDS testing sessions, which sometimes we had to do at night just to attract many target clients and distributed condoms that we received from National AIDS Control Council and other donors. The night sessions were fancifully called “moonlighting sessions” to attract students- there was music booming from the mounted loudspeakers but the focus was to test for HIV/AIDs and distribute condoms for protection. The room where weekly discussions were held was always filled to the brim. There was also the influential daily newsprint called Flashpoint, to which I had the opportunity of serving as a contributor and later as an editor. The topic of discussion ranged from campus rumors to more serious political gimmicks at the campus.

Three years earlier, prior to my joining the university, reports had leaked in the national media that a dying female student at the university had written a list of names of all male clients she had slept with and apparently infected them with the HIV. Panic had gripped the residents of the university when the report came out at the time but after 3 years, things had gone to normalcy; meaning students were sleeping around carelessly without protection or worrying about sexually transmitted infections, leave alone the dreaded HIV/AIDS virus. There was no trace an iota of evidence that 3 years earlier, a student had provided a list of names who she claimed were the people she had had unprotected sex with. Students easily intermingled with each other in their hostel rooms without the slightest care for STI. In fact, it was trendy to sleep over to the opposite sex’s room in spite of the “10 to 10 university rule.” The rule prohibited students of either sex from being found in the opposite sex room during the watershed period of between 10pm and 10am.

Much of my surprise stemmed from the fact that most students did not know the basic information about HIV/AIDS or did not take initiatives to learn. Much as they focused in their study of engineering, business, arts, and science courses, they forgot a basic tenet that defined the thin line between life and death (HIV/AIDS is no longer a matter of life and death because of the ARVs which have proven to prolong life and cause the infected person to live a normal life. But the threat of infection and re-infection is rife among the youth making the disease to remain a threat to health). But it was not just a matter of ignorance, it was a lack of sexual health education, which in many African societies is a taboo. As a young child growing up in a typical African family setting, I came to learn about sex from fellow children while we played “hide and seek” during the night. While in high school, my first competitive essay I wrote was about HIV/AIDs. When I won a commendation from the organizers of the competition, fellow students and some teachers were askance about my knowledge about HIV/AIDs at a time when scourge was spoken about in hashed tones.

I had grown up in the countryside where I saw aunts, uncles, cousins, niece, nephews and neighbors die from what was said to be HIV/AIDS. By the time I joined form one, I had this insatiable curiosity about the disease.  I had made effort to glean for any information that would help me understand more about the dreaded disease. So, when I entered high school, I was far much ahead in terms of information on what actually the disease was all about. My curiosity and interest were exacerbated even further when I learned about the story of a dying university student with a list of people she had intentionally infected with the virus. So when I joined university, I vowed never to “sleep around” with anyone matter the situation. I remember throughout my study, I turned down several occasions that would have got me compromise my vow.

But my view that the university was a conclave of ignorant people was not just founded on the reckless behaviors of students at the university. It was also founded on the fact that these young people had gone through a system where, if they learned anything about sex, it was from their peers or friends in high school or at home. There wasn’t any structured program to explicitly teach children about sexual behaviors in what is now known as sexual education in many circles. The curriculum that children are taught in school, deliberately gloss over the topic of sexuality. If teachers are embarrassed to teach their students about sex, they are, even more, ill-prepared to handle the basic content on sex education.

Children on their part are left to learn all they need to know about sex from television and other social media. I was recently startled by a friend who said she was equally startled by her 5 years’ daughter’s enquiry about a television ad that compares wearing socks to wearing a condom. Interestingly, much of the condemnation about the ad, that finally caught the eye of the reverent chairman of the Kenya Film Classification Board, was coming from the youth. This was a revelation of a scary truth about the state of sexual education in the country. That the youth who are in tertiary institutions or happens to have just come out of the university are still rigid about sexual education. Sex is still something that is embarrassing for parents and youth alike when put up for discussion.

Integrating a well-defined health education into the general curriculum at a lower grade of learning will help to inculcate the knowledge about sex in the youth. Recent findings from the NACC indicate that there is a rise in the number of new infections of HIV among the youth. Arguably, the youth characterized as those between 18-35 years are the most educated group of the Kenyan society today. Majority of undergraduate, masters, and Ph.D. holders in Kenya lie within this group. Yet, it is the same group that is showing extreme ignorance about ways to prevent infection with HIV. One reason for this is that the 8-4-4 system of learning, which is responsible for producing this lot, put emphasis on the market orientation while ignoring the basics of social interactions. Young people in the institutions of learning from the lowest grade are never taught any syllabus in sexual health.