You can't catch AIDS from sharing textbooks

As part of my orientation to Plan and the projects that I'll be assisting with for the rest of my placement, I've been visiting schools in the Kasungu District participating in the School Sanitation and Hygiene Promotion Project. The project is partly funded by the Plan Canada office, which is neat - it was both surreal and really exciting to see development dollars from the true north strong and free at work here in Malawi.
I'll write more about the project later (read: I want to run my post by the powers that be at the office to make sure that I'm providing a fair representation of one of their projects so as not to mislead fellow Canadians who may also be donors to Plan). For now, I just want to share a brief and deeply affecting episode.

We were visiting Mpsaszi Primary School to deliver construction materials and meet with the headmaster. Though I don't remember exactly the order, Mpasazi was later in the day on our first of 2 days conducting visits - probably the 5th or 6th school. So I knew the ropes.
1) We arrive in the Planmobile.
2) School is already out, so we either wait for the headmaster to come from his home (which is always nearby) or are greeted by the headmaster.
3) We go into the headmaster's office, make introductions, receive an oral progress report on the project including any oustanding problems, and sign the visitor's book.
4) We walk out to the construction (in this case, latrines) to inspect progress. These inpsections have been a great learning opportunity for me, both in terms of seeing what "good" and "bad" Ventilated Improved Pit Latrines (VIPs) look like and in terms of having the chance to talk to Sam, the field office manager (aka the "PUM"), Chingati (the Health Coordinator) and Tuntufye (the project point person) about the ins and outs of the project and Plan's history with each of the schools we visited.
5) We make sure the materials are all delivered and either chat with the headmaster, the teachers and the gaggle of children that has inevitably materialized or we pack up and go.

This visit went exactly according to the steps outlined above, with just a minor deviation in Step 3.

After showing us into his office, the headmaster was called outside to discuss the construction materials, leaving me with a little bit of time to kill. This headmaster's office, like all of the others I've seen in Malawi, doubles as a store-room for miscellaneous supplies and academic materials. The upper-primary school English textbooks happened to be on a shelf at eye-level, so I picked one up to flip through, curious about the curriculum in Malawi.

The second page of the book features a lively cartoon of children sharing books (a common occurence in Malawi - there never seem to be enough textbooks to go around), with this caption:

"You can't catch AIDS from sharing textbooks."

The previous page is also a message about AIDS - about how children with AIDS are children too; they're just special children. But it was the targeted mythbusting really dropped my stomach to my feet.

Occupying the intermediate space somewhere between "reading the statistics" and "attending the funerals" this single page brought home one of the major realities of Malawi to me in a potent, de-abstractifying way. High HIV/AIDS prevalance (one reasonably reliable estimate puts adult prevalence at 14.2%) means that children living with HIV/AIDS or at risk of being exposed to it are real, ever-present, and one of the many things that children in Malawi must be educated about that simply are not issues for the vast majority of children in Canada. I tried to put myself in the shoes of the children who must accept peers with AIDS or worse, have it themselves; with the teachers who face HIV positive pupils in primary school; and with the parents who have to field those awkward questions that children bring home from school about HIV/AIDS before we even get as far as the birds and the bees. I have a sister who will be entering elementary school fairly shortly: soon, my mom will have to explain why some children need wheelchairs or why she has to be careful about taking peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. The analogous situation here here is explaining to a child why some of her classmates have a deadly virus transmitted by sex, body fluid transfer, or from mother to child.

I pretty much failed outright in my attempt - it's just too big a thing for me to understand without ever having had to live it. But trying was a sobering experience.