Fiction and facts

Just a few interesting stories/myths/tales/even some truths I've learned in my three weeks in Zambia so far:

1. At an intervention last week (an intervention is where GRS coaches conduct one of the ten practice sessions in our curriculum), one of the older kids (about 15 or 17) was very convinced that one of the ways you could get HIV was to be bewitched be someone else.
2. Many parents don't want their kids to test at VCT events because they think that people (we) are taking their children's blood for satanic purposes.
3. You can get HIV through touching someone, sharing plates, etc.
4. Women sometimes think that their husband or boyfriend isn't being faithful if they use a condom.
5. On the other hand though, kids here have exceptional knowledge about HIV and AIDS transmission and prevention. Why is the epidemic so bad in Southern Africa then? There are other places in the world that have lots of poverty and similar levels of education...however here there is a lot of intergenerational sex and many multiple concurrent partners (partners at the same time) versus consecutive monogamy. Since the HIV virus proliferates in the first 8 weeks of exposure, to have multiple partners at the same time during that period increases the chance of passing the virus on to a partner. People are actually 40 times more likely to pass HIV on during that initial infection periof than they are the 2-10 years after that! Crazy, eh?