Lessons Learned

Something in the name Life Skills implies one must live it to actually learn it. There are books and teaching tools, lecture notes and exercises. All attempt to explain time management and decision making, leadership and relationships. Yet the best education—at least in this subject—often comes from experience.

Experience and example.

Jessica and I spend afternoons with Grade 7 learners discussing safe sex and HIV. Their questions about love and relationships continue to amaze me—almost as much as the inability to define either one of these things accurately. Whether a language barrier or just a cultural difference, I can’t be sure. But things it seems I’ve always known, though don’t actually remember learning, aren’t so common knowledge here.

Like what a good relationship looks like.

I’d say: Two people who care about each other. They can be open and honest with one another. They respect each other and carry their weight in the partnership.
My learners would say: When the girl does her job and the man does not beat her.

Or how you can tell if someone loves you.

I’d say: Small gestures that show a person knows about his or her partner. They say kind words and are considerate of feelings. They show appreciation and aren’t afraid to say, “I love you.”
My learners would say: They buy you gifts!

With answers so far from what I know is truly right, it can be hard to explain just what makes their responses so incredibly wrong.

Our Grade 7 Learners

Last week I tried to explain to our group of Grade 7s why a drunk guy yelling, “Hey lady! I love you!” isn’t really love. And why a boyfriend who runs around with other girls doesn’t make a very good boyfriend at all. I couldn’t help but wish I remembered not just what I’d been taught in Guidance class and Topics for Teens, but the way I’d been taught it, too.

The thing is, when it comes to life lessons, a lot of what I’ve learned, I’ve learned from examples set by others. I leaned about love and relationships from watching my parents. I learned about leadership from watching my teachers. And I learned about communication and compassion from watching my friends.

In a community where domestic violence is commonplace, school beatings occur daily and drunk teachers make a spectacle at intramural sporting events, good examples are tough to find.

So when we talked about love, instead of asking kids to tell me about their parents’ relationships (which are often non-existent anyway), I deferred to the Ministry of Health’s (somewhat cheesy) suggested teaching tool: The Bird of Love. Sure, one week later the kids were still able to recite that The Bird of Love, which they’d expertly copied with bright colored crayons on old scraps of paper, was only able to fly with wings of mutual trust and mutual respect. And they could tell me that it was only able to chart its course with a tail of equality. (Seriously…)

But I couldn’t help but wonder if the message had been missed. Trust, respect and gender equality are only far away ideas to many of these students who have yet to see them at work in their own lives.

Learners in Khorixas—and across all of Namibia—can recite lots of things in perfect unison. Like the causes of HIV and the ways to prevent transmission. Yet the infection rate still hovers above 20 percent. Students are taught how to properly use a condom well before they’re able to get erections, and certainly well before they should even be thinking about sex. But more girls get pregnant and drop out of school in Grade 8 than any other, providing there’s a serious disconnect between the lessons that are taught and those that are learned.