Camisihnas

My friend Rachel, who worked here for four years in the mid 90s, is responsible for coining the name of the most popular condom here in Mozambique: jeito. It's one of those untranslatable words that means something akin to skill or talent or knack. They're widely available in urban areas, but still rarely used. I've seen a lot of kids fashioning balloons from them and they're often inflated and batted around the crowd at concerts, but statistics on national condom use show that it's still sporadic at best, even in the cities. Part of the problem is that the initial Jeito marketing campaign coincided with the dawn of awareness of the AIDS epidemic in the public consciousness and the descent of a proliferation of NGOs to address it. Tenacious rumors sprouted that, at worst, Jeito condoms acutally cause HIV or, at best, the Western NGOs are profiting so much from the sale of condoms that they don't really want the epidemic to end. Jeito's initial advertising seemed to strongly link condoms with promiscutiy and probably didn't help matters any, especially for women wanting to broach the subject to their partners. The marketers are a little more sophisticated these days, but there's still little discussion of the public uneasiness with condoms or the real reasons why people are so reluctant to use them.

Condom ad heard on the car radio driving through Maputo (Translated from the Portuguese):
This program is brought to you by Kama Sutra condoms, when you need a camisinha, (little shirt, Portuguese slang) think of Kama Sutra. Now in strawberry, mango, vanilla, cheese, mint, and chocolate flavors. And there’s Long Life Kama Sutra, yes, that’s right, believe it, go the distance on the very longest voyages. Kids, be safe, use Kama Sutra condoms. They’ll prevent pregnancy and some of the nastier illnesses that can ruin your life.

Condom slogan hanging in HAI offices:
Better to come a little later in this life than come early to the next.

Indian poster of all the positions of the Kama Sutra with slogan:
Many positions with one is better than one position with many.

Now a major motion picture

The short 6 mintue film we made almost a year ago is now up on our new and improved HAI website (many kudos due to Clayton Farr, filmmaker and web designer par excellance.) It's worth a thousand blog words many times over. If you'd like to get a better idea of what we do here and what the stakes are, go here.

Happy New Year

The afternoon thunder is booming outside, I’m just back from an hour of power yoga at the house of co-worker temporarily turned yoga studio led by DVD Rodney Yee, Bach’s Cello Suites are on the ipod and I finally have a minute to update the blog. There’s a lot here and I have to again chastise myself for being such a bad, bad Blogger. The backdated entries were written a couple of months ago, but with my whirlwind schedule and spotty internet access the past few months, I haven’t had time to get to the blog. After coming back to Mozambique in mid-November, I spent only two weeks here and for much of December was in Nigeria and Ethiopia at conferences and meetings. I took a break over Christmas and New Years, first traveling in South Africa with a Maputo friend, then hosting my friends Noelle and Josephine (Noelle’s 7 year old daughter), trying to show them a cross-section of life in southern Africa in just 10 days or so. I think they were travel-sated when they left for Cape Town last Tuesday after seeing four of the big-five (we saw a leopard prance across a beach, but no lions); traveling in 4 countries; and staying in a Christian missionary flop-house on the Indian Ocean, a traditional Swazi style thatch hut, an upscale house in a rich Maputo neighborhood, an Afrikaans-owned B and B, a Rhodie-owned B and B, and my own humble rat-infested abode (more on the rats later.)

The big news is that I’m moving back to Cleveland by the end of April (interesting timing you might note, just as winter ends there and starts here.) I look forward to a lot of visiting and catching up this summer. See you soon!