by LYNDAL ROWLANDS
A nurse demonstrates how to use a condom at Christa Medical Clinic in Jinja, Uganda PHOTO/Lyndal Rowlands/IPS
Mambera Hellem tells her friends and neighbours about all forms of contraception, yet despite their high HIV risk she knows many of the women she speaks to will not use condoms.
When I ask Mambera and her friend Kyolaba Amina if it is a woman or a man who decides to wear a condom, Kyolaba giggles softly at my question. “It is not easy for a woman to initiate condom use because it will bring about questions of trust,” says Mambera. “The man would ask the wife if she does not trust him.”
Kyolaba though has deeper suspicions, adding that some men “deliberately want to infect their wives”.
“I don’t know why men do that but I have seen a case where a woman and a man had discordant (HIV) results but the man did not want to use condoms because before they were having unprotected sex, why (not) now.”
In a country where many myths abound around contraceptives and their side effects, the most popular forms of contraception for the women in this community are depo-provera “depo” and intrauterine device (IUD) implants.
“You find many women who have children every year, so it is such women we reach out to,” says Mambera.
Some women even prefer IUDs or depo because unlike condoms they can keep them secret from their husbands, and this is not the only aspect of their sex lives which women keep secret, says Kyolaba:
“We do talk about HIV and tell the women to go for testing but many women are afraid to tell their husbands about this thing and they do secretly come for testing.”
“I have an example of my neighbour who came to the clinic and tested positive but has kept this as a secret, not told her husband, because it could lead to violence in the home,” she says.
As I speak to Mambera and Kyolaba in the backyard of the Christa clinic in Jinja, Uganda, a group of women cradling babies on their laps watch as a nurse demonstrates how to use a condom. The clinic serves a poor community near the banks of Lake Victoria and the source of the Nile river providing free and low cost family planning services.
Services such as these are patchy at best in Uganda which has one of the highest birth rates in the world: the average Ugandan women will give birth to six babies during her lifetime.
Inter Press Service for more