Pieter Dirk Uys is taking a message of safer sex to schools across the country. Hilary Fine took in a performance
Oak avenues and abundant greenery surround a school with a long tradition of politeness, where learners still refer to their educators as ”madam”. These girls seem to have nothing to fear as they face their bright futures. But HIV/Aids is indiscriminate. ”We’re scared to death of dying of love,” says Pieter Dirk Uys who was at Roedean in Johannesburg to talk about sex.”We know what we should be telling young people but we don’t always know how to say these things. Laughter makes things less frightening,” says Uys.
To lighten the tone in the hall of 200 uncomfortably reserved learners and teachers, Uys begins with jokes of a general nature. The room is soon full of smiles. At this point Uys begins to dispel a few dangerous myths.
Uys knows that the ”it can’t happen to me” attitude is prevalent among youth throughout the country. He explains that HIV/Aids can happen to anyone — anyone who isn’t vigilant. Uys emphasises that safest sex is no sex and that, yes, it is best to wait for marriage. This is very much the line Roedean takes, according to psychologist Terry Wilkie.
Uys emphasises that women need to be empowered: ”It is your body and you have the right to say no. You have the freedom of choice.” Yet, the reality is that many girls do choose to have sex.
”The girls are sophisticated,” says Margaret Westgate, a teacher at Roedean who organised Uys’s talk.”Many are already sexually active in high school. The grade 7s should have been here,” Westgate says.
Young people are having sex so they need their questions answered. ”Most of what we learn at school you can read in a pamphlet,” says grade 12 pupil Nasreen Ganchi. ”We need to know more.”
Clinical advice about behaviour don’t seem to work. To a rapt audience Uys parodies a typical sex education session in which the teacher puts a condom on a banana. ”Oh so you put the condom on a banana! And then what? That’s what you think, right?” In response to a chorus of laughter Uys cries ”This is not what boys and men have between their legs. This is!” and he pulls out a large, yet lifelike, rubber phallus. ”This is what you have to put the condom on, so practise,” instructs Uys.
Although Uys emphasises that the safest sex is no sex, abstinence education is seldom successful. It is Uys’s condom demonstration which provides a more realistic approach to the problem of HIV/Aids. The message from Uys is clear: if you choose to have sex make sure you use a condom.
Uys is intent on spreading this message as far and wide as possible. Last year he took took his show to 90 schools in the Western Cape and is currently touring Gauteng.
But many parents and teachers do not think it is appropriate to talk to young people about sex. Responding to claims that his performance is offensive, Uys says there were moans from a few people: ”The Malay schools were fine, only a few parents and teachers at the Afrikaans schools seemed to have a problem. They don’t want me talking to their children about sex.”
Although parents and teachers may think the information being presented goes too far, worldy-wise learners reveal a very different picture, Tessa Roos, a grade 12 pupil, says ”It was encouraging, but there was nothing he said that we didn’t already know. He could have been more explicit.”
Headgirl Veruski Vogt says: ”It was very important and will get people talking more about these things.”
And that is Uys’s aim — to break the silence.
”Sex will happen and you can’t think it’s not going to happen to you,” says Uys, ”because it one of the reasons we are all here”.
If you would like to arrange for Pieter Dirk Uys to visit your school, e-mail him at — [email protected]
— The Teacher/Mail & Guardian, March, 2001.
M&G Supplements