HE CAN SEE that the future of Barbados will be devastating if there is not a decrease soon in the rate of which Barbadians are contracting HIV/AIDS.
According to Hughson Inniss, the country’s 15 to 49 age group – Barbados’ most productive age group – is heavily impacted by the disease. And Barbados can ill afford to have its productive sector taken away by the deadly disease.
“We cannot continue to have that level of impact in our society, we need to see some decrease and unfortunately according to the latest statistics, we are having an increase rather than decrease. We are now forced to look at different methodologies to put the message forward,” said the HIV/AIDS programme co-coordinator and trainer at the Ministry of Education for the past three years.
The 61-year-old, who was connected to the Youth Affairs Department where he was a leading educator in HIV/AIDS, holds the responsibility for overseeing and planning HIV/AIDS programmes for primary, secondary and tertiary institutions.
He has been involved in the fight to eliminate HIV/AIDS from society for the past ten years and he does not plan on stopping until “it is time for me to end”.
But he sometimes wonders what the future holds for his country when “things are happening in primary schools that amaze and alarm me”.
“We go into the schools and we interact with the students and I have been dealing more recently with the Class 3 and Class 4 students from the primary schools because these are the ones going on to secondary schools and we have to prepare them for what they will find when they make that change.”
“When they get there it is not going to be easy because there is a high level of sexual behaviour and activity in our secondary schools. Young children are doing things that would not have been heard of in time past and we are very concerned about that because they could very well be exposed to the disease through these activities and behaviours,” said Inniss.
This revelation has motivated Inniss and other members of his team to find a creative strategy of reaching out to primary school children before it is too late.
“I try to pull from the young children what they know and test their level of knowledge towards HIV so I would know where to take them. I refuse to stand up and tell them we got to do this and do that.
I get them to tell me the best way they think they could avoid being infected. When they tell me what’s on their mind I help them to create a pledge with their input.
“I write on the board abstain from sex and then I turn to them and say ‘is it just sex that you are abstaining from’, what about the other things surrounding sex and they would say all sex. The pledge would come out like, I will abstain from all sexual activities because
I don’t want to get HIV early, because I am not ready for sex, because I don’t want to have children early . . . .” said Inniss who has trained over 28 000 individuals in the last seven years, through over 700 training sessions.
This MONDAY MAN said there was “no holding back in the way I talk to the older students because I know what they are exposed to”.
“The students in secondary schools are different and there is no hiding there. They even teach me a thing or two, especially in the tertiary institutions. They teach me about their terminologies, the things that they say in their own language to hide from the older ones, because we are not supposed to know what is going on with them. Eventually they tell me what is going on and I use their language then to communicate with them,” he said.
Inniss reported that unfortunately many of Barbados’ youths were taking chances with their lives because they felt they could not contract the disease because “they are young”. But, this attitude can be described as being “a sense of denial” because the messages are going to them but only a few are taking heed.
He added: “There are few who are abstaining and I am glad about that. I would like to encourage the few and use them as peer educators for the others who are being promiscuous.”
With Wednesday being World AIDS Day, Inniss’ message to the people of this country is: “Let us all unite with a real hard effort to really fight HIV/AIDS. He has called for less talking and more actions, to be involved in the fight.
