sex ed...?

I don’t know how you feel about having “the sex talk” with teenagers, but for me it’s just slightly awkward. One thing I never thought I would do while here is have a sex talk with the girls at MAHOTT (Methodist angel house orphanage, Tarime Tanzania—this is the abbreviation I will use from now on). To be completely honest, I was dreading the meeting and was intending on staying quiet the entire time. But, God is a comedian, and he had other plans. The meeting with the secondary girls was actually the highlight of my day. There have been some issues with some of the older girls, mainly regarding boys/boyfriends, hence the meeting/talk. Those on my team with boyfriends spoke a little bit about why their relationships work on a purely non-physical level and then the talk progressed into the wait until marriage spiel. During the course of our discussion, the girls inform us of certain men in town they call fataki’s. These men are usually older, most likely married, and wealthy and outrageously exploit young girls. They will give the girls a phone, or a new shirt, or buy them a soda in exchange for the gift of their bodies, utterly damaging their self-worth and taking what does not belong to them. Even more saddening is that some of these men are their teachers—who will give better marks if the girls sleep with them. Some of these men can be dangerous going as far as inflicting serious injury for those who do not comply. These girls are so precious and deserve to live without the fear of exploitation, and I pray and hope that you will burn with the same kind of righteous anger that is in each of my team members for the atrocities that occur. I hope that our talk with them will give them the strength to say no to these evil men if they ever find themselves in that position, and that they know deep in their soul that they are worth more than all the gold and jewels in the world. Pray for the fataki’s that they may see what they are doing as evil and let girls be just that, girls.