Safe Sex

Last Wednesday I got to watch one of my girls giggle her way through putting a condom on a wooden model of a penis. It was, without a doubt, a productive day.

Talking about sex in Chile is a delicate endeavor. Although most soap operas here border on soft porn and mainstream culture is over-sexualized to the max, Chile is also an extremely Catholic country. Hogar San Francisco, where I volunteer, is a Catholic institution and the nuns wandering through the patio are a constant reminder of what we're allowed and not allowed to talk to the girls about. Volunteers spoke to the staff about creating some sort of Sex Ed workshop in the past but met resistance. For some reason, though, possibly including the fact that one of the girls recently moved to a home especially for pregnant teens, the staff was more open to the idea when Jamie, my co-volunteer, and I brought it up two weeks ago.

We recently discovered a clinic here in Santiago called ICMER (Instituto Chileno de Medicina Reproductiva, or Chilean Institute of Reproductive Medicine) that's quite similar to Planned Parenthood. By local standards, ICMER is a very liberal clinic, mainly because they provide emergency contraception, no questions asked. Normal pharmacies here carry the morning-after pill but often refuse it to customers or provide it with a side of judgment. ICMER also offers a free family planning workshop every Wednesday that goes over every birth control option clearly and thoroughly.

Jamie and I, with miraculous permission from San Fran, took the six oldest girls to this workshop last week. I expected the girls to collapse into piles of laughter with every diagram and mention of the word "penis," but they impressed me. They listened respectfully, asked thoughtful questions and, of course, let the occasional giggle slip out. Sandra, our bad-ass new midwife friend who runs the workshops, was great about helping them relax and ask questions, however basic. The girls took the workshop seriously and seemed to have a lot to think about when we left.

There was only one other person in the workshop with us, a teenage girl who had come with her mom, although her mom stayed in the waiting room during the workshop. The presence of this girl made me think a lot about everything our girls miss out on by not having supportive families. It's great that Jamie and I brought the girls to this workshop and we can follow up with them later on about these topics, but that's still light-years away from an ideal situation. Almost every girl we work with has been sexually abused--for many of them it's why they're in the home. We can tell them their options and laugh with them through a condom demonstration but we can't make sex be something normal for them, something that doesn't come with a lot of fear and confusion. It's confusing enough for kids who live with supportive families that communicate openly without adding a history of abuse into the mix. When I wish for safe sex for these girls, there's so much more to wish for than pills and implants and injections.

So we're just going to keep trucking! Everything we do with the girls is meant to help build their self-esteem and create positive self-images, so hopefully, although we'll never really know, one of these days one of the girls will make a decision that's good for her and not just what she thinks she should do. And, maybe, everyone once in a while we can remind that girl of how soft she said the lubricated condom made her hands feel. Bonus.