RTK - Jamaica Youth

Seven years ago, Damian Brown was selling clothes and novelties in the bus park of his hometown in Jamaica. Today, the 22-year-old volunteers for Right to Know and is a senior youth skills and life skills instructor for the NGO Children First, helping other street and working children improve their lives and protect themselves from HIV/AIDS. Here, Damian reflects on his path to his current position and his work in HIV/AIDS.

How he became involved in youth work:
I became involved through Children First, a nongovernmental organization that works with street and working children. I didn't live on the streets, but I had worked on the street selling clothes and novelties from a very young age, so I was labeled a street working youth.

I had always wanted to be an actor, and I wanted to meet Claudette Richardson-Pious, a very famous actress who is the director of Children First — I thought acting was so glamorous. When I was 15, I got to meet her, and I told her I wanted to be an actor. She told me school was important and development was important, and she started telling me how she went to school and had a master's and all of these degrees. It made me realize that to be an actor, you need an education. I started taking things more seriously and putting more interest in school, and I got involved with child rights and human rights issues, doing workshops with young people my age and giving information so that they could empower themselves.

How HIV-positive people are treated in Jamaica:
In Jamaica, there's a stigma that if you're HIV-positive, you're a person who ran around and had sex with everybody. Then I started meeting people who were married and who got the virus from a partner who was unfaithful, and I realized that when you become sexually active you're at risk. Anybody can get HIV/AIDS.

People treat HIV-positive people as something less than a human being. At one point, they didn't want to hire people who were HIV-positive. A lot of the discrimination comes from education and how service providers share information with others. Some make it sound so serious, like if you touch someone with HIV/AIDS, you're going to die. They make having HIV seem like suicide, it's so horrible. We need to impart the information so that people understand HIV isn't some killer that just grabs you when you're on the road. The stigma surrounding HIV is the biggest barrier we have to talking about it, and that is something that can only be changed by education. A lot of people have the correct information, but society sometimes dictates to you what to say and how to act around HIV-positive people, and that's not really you.

We have been doing a lot of work to change things. We say, This is a virus you get by sexual contact; you don't get it by hugging someone or drinking out of the same glass or shaking their hand. Things are not 100% where we want them to be, but people are trying to treat others with more respect and get rid of some of the stigma.

On participatory research in action:
PAR is a very good method. What's different about it is that it provides the kind of environment where young people will feel comfortable. Because you're not just asking them questions like what is HIV, it's more interactive and the activities are even more participatory. It doesn't look like you're preaching toward them or behaving as if you think they're dumb. You're at the same level. You're learning from them, and they're learning from you.

What PAR has taught RTK about HIV/AIDS knowledge in Jamaican youth:
We know that the young people have a lot of information. We found that the young kids aged 10 to 13 knew a lot, more than the young people who were 15 to 19. That was surprising to us. If we hadn't done RTK, we wouldn't have known that. We also know that a lot of kids have correct information, but when they go back to the society or environment where they grew up, they have to comply with whatever their environment says is correct. They might know that they have to use a condom to protect themselves, but when they go back to their environment, people are telling them if you're a man, you have to have sex without a condom. It's hard for them to practice what you preach.

Another thing was that the young people knew exactly who they wanted to get information from and how. They said they would want to learn from young people their age, because young people our age understand what we're going through. Older people already are set in their ways and know what they want to say. We did this exercise called condom mapping, where the young people make a map of where they can get condoms and where it's difficult to get condoms and why. They would say that if the service provider was a young person, it was easy to get condoms, but if it was an older person, the older person would say, “What do you need a condom for? You're too young to have sex.” A younger person, in his early 20s, would just say, “Do you know how to put it on?”, and sell it.

We also look at how boys and girls are different and how that affects their livelihood. Girls sometimes complain that boys are allowed to go out but they're not, so they don't have room for development. So boys get out and get street-smart, but when girls go out they get pregnant because they've been cooped up and haven't learned street smarts.

What impact RTK has had:
When we first met the participants, they had a lot of myths and misconceptions. At the end, we could see their whole behavior, their whole approach, the way they look at life change. The ones who came in saying that people with HIV should be locked away, these were the same people who at the end said that these are people just like us; we just have to be careful and make sure they're responsible in their sexual activities. I think that's one of the biggest successes of the workshops.

On being a role model:
One of the young people in my workshops said, I want to be a facilitator just like you. It makes me feel good that they see me as a role model. Especially when I go back to the bus park where I used to sell, it's wonderful to see all those people looking at me. A guy who's worked selling all his life is going back to remedial school because he saw me. I'm not rich or anything, but success comes in many ways. When young people hear my story, they feel they can achieve.