It is a church run school but the gloves on sexuality and sex are about to come off at the Eden Seventh Day Adventist High School in Cayo. 22 of the school’s teachers and its principal are spending the first week of their Easter break at the San Ignacio Hotel. That’s where the alliance against aids is teaching the teachers how to discuss sex and sexuality – and its relation to HIV and Aids in the classroom. It is not the type of thing teachers like to discuss in the classroom but today’s facilitator - social worker and psychologist Alex Vega – says it is something that must be discussed.
Alex Vega, Psychologist
“Young people are hungry for information regarding their bodies, information regarding their sexualities. Lots of time we want to think we can address HIV and Aids by giving very simplistic messages and prescriptions to people. We believe that by giving prescriptions to people, people will go ahead and do that; don’t have sex and you will think that your population won’t. That’s not the way sexuality works, that is not the way eroticism works. We all have feelings and desires and eroticism and therefore we have to educate desire, we have to put it on the table and talk about it.”
Keith Swift,
Is there a G rated approach of doing that?
Alex Vega,
“No. Sexuality education needs to explicitly speak of the concepts, name things by their names, and in so doing we can address the problems that our population is affecting. Our goal is that the teachers and our different populations across the country, we are doing eight workshops, we are on the seventh, leave the workshops with an increased capacity to understand their own sexualities and to be able to manage sexuality concepts. The second aim is for them to understand what happens when a students brings up a question or has a problem and they can be able to deal with it, they can be able to talk about certain concepts, certain issues that are affecting them and not run away from it.”
The workshop ends tomorrow. As Vega mentioned, similar workshops have been held by Alliance Against Aids in other parts of the country.
