Escojo Mi Vida

I just started a course for the youth here on sexual health and how to make healthy and non-rash decisions. It's so necessary to have this type of information available to the youth here because they get married and pregnant so young, and HIV/AIDS is so prevalent. The course is called ESCOJO MI VIDA (translation: I choose my life). We meet every Wednesday night, and the course consists of 15 lessons based on themes such as values, self-esteem, the male and females reproductive organs, HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, abstinence, and birth control. Once the course ends, we’re going to have a graduation for the kids and they will become multipliers of the information that they just learned. Then they will go to the schools and churches in Baoba and surrounding communities to give lectures and dramas to other kids. It’s an amazing program here in the Dominican Republic that gives the youth here an opportunity to become leaders in the community.

The program also gives the youth a great opportunity to travel and see new places in the country and meet other kids their age because there almost every Peace Corps volunteer has a similar youth group. There are sub-regional, regional, and national conferences, and I am actually here in Santo Domingo on “official business.” The regional conference is April 3-5, and I can go with only 2 kids in my youth group. So I lied to them: I told the youth group the Peace Corps is going to choose who gets to go based on their answers to 2 essay questions. The questions were “what does Escojo Mi Vida mean for you?” and “Why do you want to go to the conference?” They all gave me their answers before I left for Santo Domingo on Saturday, and so I’m going to read through them and choose. I had to make everything sound official because I don’t want the kids to think I am choosing favorites or to ask me why I picked one person instead of another. So this way I can pretend to be neutral in this whole decision process.

So far I am absolutely loving this course, and the kids are too. It really gives me the chance to do a lot of fun activities with the youth that I feel normally they wouldn’t have the opportunity to do. On Sunday, March 8, we went to visit another volunteer’s Escojo group to celebrate International Women’s Day. We crammed 20 people into a pick up truck, and had a great time learning about famous Dominican women and parading through the other volunteer’s site. All of my girls spent the entire morning before we left doing their hair, putting on makeup and dressing in their finest attire. The guys too were decked out in their blingin’ gangster chains and sunglasses. So I think everyone really enjoyed their day out of Boaba.