Pie Dilemmas (and no, not whether to choose pumpkin or pecan...)

First real VCT, second big event, and whether it was coincidence, confidence, less organization needed overall or fate, I'm not sure, but it went much, much smoother than the first. Things didn't go 100% according to plan (they never do here), like we were supposed to start at 8 AM and things only really got moving at 10, but at the end of the day we tested over 300 people and maybe even over 400, so the late start didn't seem to put much of a damper on our ability. I'm getting way ahead of myself here though. Let me first explain what a VCT even is.

VCT stands for Voluntary Counselling and Testing - it's a free service whereby people are tested for HIV using kits that only require a tiny pinprick of blood and take about 10 of 15 minutes. Since GRS doesn't test people ourselves, we have other organizations we partner with that come and do the testing for us, like Tiny Tim and Friends (TTF) - a paediatric-focused organization, CIDRZ, and Marie Stopes who not only test but also provide family planning. At Saturday's event Marie Stopes only tested about 50 individuals, but they did on-the-spot IUD insertion (birth control by way of an Inter-Uterine Device...Google it if you don't know what I'm talking about), and disseminated a lot of information other forms of birth control as well as male circumcision (which reduces a man's chances of acquiring HIV). If an individual is found to be HIV positive, they're then followed up by one of these organizations/clinics and given comprehensive care, counselling and treatment.

But back to Saturday's VCT: One of our biggest challenges at these events is figuring out how to draw more parents and guardians out. We had hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands, of children milling around but no guardians, and children under 16 years old need a parent or guardian's consent in order to test.

The kids crack me up, and it's so weird because I never thought I was a kid person before this. Time and time again at the VCT they began to surround me, with giggles and cornrows and dust-caked clothes (some appropriate and just well-worn, others almost comical - a princess-like dress worn casually? but it's all they have...), with grins and sores and new teeth pushing through pink gums, with flies perched on their dreads and babies saddled to their young non-existent hips (siblings, no doubt), with their excitement at the seemingly mundane and their gyrating hips at a song with a heavy beat; they represent incongruous mixtures in the same single person. They are powerful in numbers - jostling and pushing to the front, creating a mob-like scene either around us muzungus (white people) or around the local Zambian pop performers - and it can be easy to forget their needs when, for a split second, you wonder if they would trample you should you be pushed to the ground...

Talking about VCTs, kids in these compounds, GRS's role as an NGO, it's so hard not to resort to cliches and to express my thoughts, feelings and beliefs in a logical, coherent way. Maybe it's because there IS no organization to them. I want to help these kids, to provide motivating role models for them, to set up the structure to help empower and educate them, to have a sense of self-efficacy even if they won't become movie stars, but in the same breath it's so frustrating and tiresome and emotionally trying when people ask you for things NONSTOP. I genuinely don't think I've ever been asked for so many things in such a short period of time. "Give me 50 000 kwacha [the currency here]," "Give me a ribbon," "Give me food." When I would try and explain that everyone else was asking for that too - how could I only choose and give to one person? How could that ever be fair? - they would just keep on pressing. I know that it makes sense, I would probably do the same if I were in their situation: if you don't have anything to lose and only have the possibility to gain, why no push for whatever you can get? Why not ask and ask and ask, one day you might get something.

Case in point: we had leftover pies from lunch (not pies like fruit pies, they're meat pies with potatos in a sort of gravy, and encased by flakey pastry. Delicious but deadly amounts of oil) and a member of the GRS staff decided to give them to a few kids who had helped move desks back into classrooms where they belonged. I told the staff member that I didn't think it was a good idea - I had already witnessed the frenzy that the kids went into when something, anything, was given away for free - but he insisted and I decided to stay out of it. Sure enough, after he had given out the pies, the lucky recipients went streaming from the room bragging to anyone who would listen, and a legitimate stampede of kids followed, elbowing their way to the front of the crowd. It wasn't fair and it was unnecessarily obvious, and then for the next hour we spent cleaning up and waiting for a truck to get there, we had to fend off children asking for pies. It's such a shitty feeling, knowing that you do have 10 or 12 pies left, that you may or may not eat them, that you definitely don't need them, yet you lie because there's no fair way to distribute them. The worst part was that I justified it in my head by thinking that we'd give them out to our coaches who had worked hard all day long and who were riding back in a truck with the tents, yet when we got back home they had all already been dropped off. So there we were, unnecessarily left with extra pies (when we have about 20 in our freezer already), we could have unfairly distributed them to a select few kids who probably would have loved them, and I just have no idea what's morally correct in this situation.

Moral dilemmas aside, the preliminary numbers tested are great and beyond that, the warmth, energy and crystallized joy that I witnessed on Saturday leaves me with positive connotations and a sense of pride that I played a real role in the planning and execution of this event.