High School Visits

Lycée Francais

We visited two special secondary schools in Port-au-Prince. One was the exclusive Lycée Francais Alexandre Dumas. The other top-notch institution was the privileged Union School founded in 1908.   Many of Haiti’s top families and diplomats send their children here where they learn impeccable English as well as French (Creole is optional).  Future leaders in business and government will graduate from these schools.

At both place, I spoke in English – I needed no translation. I much prefer speaking without a translator because it takes half the time to tell a story about AIDS compared to waiting for the interpretation. I can also better judge the reactions of the teens when I say something dramatic or humorous, both important points to my story telling and that teens love.  They respond best to human interest stories of real people that I have known – the human pathos stays in their mind better than a dry lecture on HIV prevention fact6s.  I hear, “I really liked how you talked to us  - it is very interesting.”  I put in facts as part of the story.

Lycee Francais

Lycee Francais: At the end of the school day, we met in the library with 25 older teens. It was equally mixed between boys and girls. So I knew I could have some serious fun in my lecture.  I always try to start off each talk by shaking hands, looking them in the eyes, and introducing myself -- and asking for their names.  This approach is unusual and adolescents respond because they feel the special attention.  It is a technique that I learned from my early political days. When I lectured at Harvard’s School of Public Health, I taught health and medical professionals that they needed to use this approach to be more effective.  With teens, it sets a mood that I am interested in who they are and I am not just talking down to them.

At the end of the talk, there were a lot of questions. One dealt with the origin of HIV, which is a question that I get a lot. One young woman asked I thought that since condoms protect young people from HIV, why should teens postpone sex if they want to have it?  I explained that condoms sometimes break but more importantly, the first sexual experiences for young people can impact them psychologically,  especially if one partner is using the other, used coercive peer pressure or lied about loving them..

Union School:  I spoke to 130 young people from grades 6-12. I asked the head teacher to mix the students up so that the youngest were sitting with older students. A remarkable young man named Karim Duval (18) arranged this assembly after hearing about Dr. Bill Pape’s request to Union to arrange my talk.. When speaking with him beforehand, he told me that he is going to Northeastern University in Boston in the fall.  He has already visited to see the school and so we had a lot to talk about because I lived in the Cambridge-Boston area for close to 20 years while doing graduate studies at MIT and Harvard and running my art publishing business, Paté Poste on Beacon Hill. He is also going to Costa Rica this summer and I plan on putting him in touch with Giovanni, who is our Global Board representative in that country.

I started off with the story of Rafael of Guatemala and how he had contracted HIV/AIDS as an illegal alien living in Boston. Because Rafael was so angry with his situation, he told me that he was going to give AIDS to as many women as he could because someone had given it to him! When I explained that I would have to contact the public health authorities, he disappeared and I heard that he “lost” himself in New York City.  This story always generates shock in a teen audience.

The questions were perceptive. One young student asked if dogs got HIV?  After the initial laughter, I explained that monkeys have a form called SIV (for Simian) and so do cats  but they don’t die.  This gave me an opening to ask, “Do any of you have dogs?”  A sea of hands jumped into the air.  And of course, I spoke about the love of my life Jazz, my 10 year old Yellow