Sex Ed Project

Last week I completed my first big project. It involved the Education Officer, the Community Development Officer, the Public Health Officer, 1 doctor, 1 nurse, and 2 people from Raks Thai Foundation. It was basically a sexual education week with 8th graders. The project was very difficult to plan mainly due to the language barrier. I spent days drafting the plan in Thai and English, meeting with different people, trying to gather support and trying to make people understand my Thai. Then I had to plan all of the activities and lessons for the whole project.. in Thai. Everyone wanted me to lead some of the sessions but I refused to teach. I wanted all sessions led by a doctor or nurse who was a native Thai speaker. Surprisingly, I got away with that and didn't have to teach a single thing.

Many of the students at the school are from the Mhong Hill Tribe and are often expected to get married and have kids very early in life (14-15 years old). I wanted to encourage these kids to think about their choices, their future, and make decisions for themselves. If these students want to have children already, I want them to be as informed as possible and know what they are getting into.

The project began with the students carrying an egg around with them for a week and treating it like their child. The teachers were all told about the project and were supposed to help make sure the students had the egg everywhere they went. After a week of this we asked the students how taking care of the egg was and they all complained about how hard it was and how many of them had broken their egg sometime during the week. One student actually ate his egg for breakfast on the second day. When we then compared taking care of a child to taking care of an egg and asked the students if they wanted to have kids yet they all screamed "NO!"

The last day of the project was a full day of sexual education training. The girls learned about family planning, birth control, and how to be confident enough to say no. Their session was led by a female nurse, and 2 women from Raks Thai foundation. The boys also learned about family planning, a little bit about birth control, and then STDs. We played sex jeopardy and taught both the boys and girls how to use condoms by putting them on cucumbers.

I surveyed the students at the beginning to find out how much they knew, and found out it wasn't much. Many of them had no idea if you could get an STD from hugging someone, if birth control was the man or woman's responsibility, if it's okay to ask your partner about STDs, etc. I surveyed them again after and they learned quite a bit, but some of them definitely still have a long way to go before I would consider them well informed to make safe and healthy choices. I also learned that a few of the students are already sexually active at such a young age. I am hoping to do a lot more work on sexual education  both with these same students and with students even younger. I would love to do a project with the parents too, teaching them how to talk to their children about different topics that are never talked about in Thailand.  Hopefully we can actually make a difference in a few of these kids lives.