Money Woes Force AIDS Educator Home

John Chittick, the American professor who spent a month in Cambodia teaching young people the dangers of AIDS, said a money crunch is bringing his global education effort to an end.

Chittick made a return visit last month, a year and a half after first bringing his AIDS-prevention message to Cambodia, which now has one of the region’s highest infection rates. The most recent trip, Chittick said, will probably be his last.

“I’m pretty heavily in debt,” he said. “Over the past two years, I’ve spent about $100,000, and the program is not self-sustaining right now.”

He says he is writing a book about his experiences that he hopes will earn enough to repay his creditors.

Chittick, a former lecturer at the Harvard University School of Public Health in the US state of Massachusetts, has visited 40 countries in the past two years and trained almost 70,000 volunteers in his simple, straightforward approach to spreading the word: Tell the truth.

He said he believes that teaching young people the basics about AIDS and asking them to pass that information along is the most effective and least expensive technique available in developing countries.

“I tell them, ‘If you love a friend, don’t hesitate to save a friend,’ ” he said. “Talk to your friends about sex. Don’t say, ‘It’s not my business.’ ”

Chittick, who holds a PhD in adolescent psychology, said the key to reaching young people in any culture is not to moralize or to preach a particular religious point of view, but to provide information so they can make their own choices.

Chittick’s travels have taken him from North and South Amer­ica through Africa and Europe, as well as Asia. And while the AIDS epidemic is about 20 years old in Africa, affecting people of all ages, it has only been circulating in Cambodia since the early 1990s.

“Cambodia has one of the young­est groups [of victims] in the world,” he said, and many do not yet know they are infected.

He said the country’s recent history of war and hardship has left some with the feeling that this is just another scourge to endure, and there is nothing a person can do about it.

“I tell them, ‘You always have the op­portunity to save yourselves,’” he said. “And I do see hope. I see lots of young men who don’t have sex” because of fears of contracting AIDS.

Chittick has staged what he called “Stop Action Theater,” which encouraged youths to role-play the situations in which they felt pressured to have unsafe sex. He said he has trained about 100 young vol­unteers who he hopes will  con­tinue to educate their peers.

“Cambodia needs extra help, and the government tells me AIDS is not their only priority,” he said.

 

 

 

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