Awareness not suited for rural areas: study
By AIVA TAMATE
A STUDY was done in a remote part of Madang province to deteremine how effective the HIV/AIDS awareness campaign is in rural areas.
The study by Medical Anthropologist Dr Verena Keck was done among the Yupno people located in the Teptep area.
Dr Keck’s study, called HIV/AIDS as a Global Epidemic: Local Understandings and Accommodations presented recently at the Divine Word University gives a sense of the level of understanding on HV/AIDS and the awareness campaigns.
Dr Keck who has been visiting the country for almost 20 years said her study found that most HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns were designed for people in towns and urban areas and rarely relate to or attempt to target people in the rural areas.
“On the posters, a message for urban middle-class people is spread with which the Yupno and certainly people living in rural areas can hardly identify. Sexual encounters among the Yupno people take place in the garden or in the bush and ‘sikAIDS’- campaigns with texts or posters which young people in the rural regions can identify are highly recommended,” she said.
Dr Keck said a poster which appeared in the local newspapers in 2004, showing a couple on a narrow path on the way to the bush, with the text reading ‘ways of infection of HIV/AIDS’ at the top and further down the page, ‘If you have sex with someone who has HIV/AIDS and you don’t use a condom’ would be an illustration of the reality of young people in rural areas.
Her study further recommends that gender awareness is needed in the area to educate women on sexual and other health issues, so as to increase general awareness. She added that due to the male population being given priority to education many females lack proper education and therefore are not as aware of the HIV/AIDS, the distinction between HIV and AIDS, Sexually Transmitted Infections and the modes of transmission.
“On the whole efforts towards better sexual education for teenagers should urgently be stepped up since it is they who are a vulnerable group. Topics such as sexual health, ideas about conception and different methods of family planning should be introduced in the school curricula in community schools.
Dr Keck together with her colleagues Professor Jurg Wassmann Anita and Alexis von Poser also anthropologists at the Institute of Anthropology, University of Heidelberg, in Germany visited Divine Word University, Madang, recently especially to start a four-year programme of scientific co-operation.
Their visits to the university will be ongoing during the four years and Dr Keck has said that this programme will expand over the years to come.
The primary aims are to establish a social anthropology strand, with courses on theory, history as well as on subfields in anthropology, as for example medical anthropology or the anthropology of landscape.
These courses that are part of the Papua New Guinea Studies Department at DWU are taught by scholars and PhD students from Heidelberg; in a reciprocal way, scholars from Papua New Guinea will visit the Institute of Anthropology, Heidelberg, to teach on contemporary issues in PNG Studies.
Dr Keck said it is an important goal of the co-operation to integrate the perspective of indigenous scholars into the European perspective of anthropology.
The programme is founded by the German Academic Exchange Service and has started in 2008.

Further information: juerg.wassmann@urz.uni-heidelberg.de.
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