Hi everyone,
I really enjoyed hearing what everybody had to say on Rwanda yesterday – it’s fun to hear so many different perspectives from people with lots of different backgrounds and experience!
Something I found interesting in the readings in the Rwanda Demographics Healt Survey was the often lack of correspondence between what people say and what they do. I found this particularly prominent in the chapter on HIV/AIDS, where surveys would be taken on AIDS prevention, etc., and in theory, a (generally) high percentage of people knew the risks involved in not using protection, the importance of using condoms, etc., but still failed to put this knowledge into practice. I was surprised, for example, to see that more men than women (marinally, but still) saw it as necessary to wear condoms, however, in practice, I imagine that this is not really the case… Also, there was a pole taken on whom people thought it was appropriate to sleep with, and, not surprisingly, the high 90 percentile of people said that people should be monogamous, just sleeping with their significant other. However, in surveying people on the habits of people they knew, this obviously turned out to be untrue that people lived by their ideals/standards of sleeping with one parner. This is a truth that is worldwide, of course – that people don’t act as they know they ought.
This just got me thinking that even with education (and of course I think it’s absolutely essential), it takes a long time for habits to actually change. It’s frustrating, though, because we see that it’s harmful, people know it’s harmful and dangerous themselves, and yet these trends persist.
What do you think?
Elise