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Into Africa
A
passion for educating people about HIV/AIDS
leads one Beloit professor to the place most adversely affected by
the disease.
By
Susan Kasten
Only five years before HIV emerged, Associate Professor of
Biology Marion Field Fass was taught that the era of infectious
diseases had ended. As graduate students in public health,
she and her
classmates learned that their futures would focus instead on
chronic illnesses, like heart disease.
Then came AIDS.
“We were taught that infectious diseases
weren’t important,
and suddenly the world changed,” Fass says. “With
AIDS, it’s been very clear that the model scientists
and public health professionals had in the 1970s was wrong.” The
impact of AIDS on science and public health became a powerful
force to Fass, helping shape her reformist ideas about education
and launching her on a mission to better understand the disease
and to teach others about it.
“HIV has demonstrated to me more than anything else
that students need to develop skills they can adapt and apply
to a changing world,” she says.
In fact, Fass’ career at Beloit
began with AIDS education. In 1990, she developed a global
AIDS epidemic course for non-science majors as a part-time
faculty member. Within a few years, she joined the faculty
full-time and is now arguably Beloit’s expert on HIV/AIDS.
Fass teaches microbiology and courses that deal with health
and society, including that
original course about AIDS—now called Emerging Diseases.
Many activities from this class are included in a collection
of educational activities called Microbes Count!, a book
she recently edited with biology professors John Jungck and
Ethel Stanley for the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium, a program
based at Beloit that supports reform of the undergraduate biology
curriculum.
Fass’ teaching has influenced many students to devote
their professional and volunteer efforts to improving public health. Like many of them, her passion for improving AIDS education
has taken her as far as Africa, where she recently collaborated
with a group of African universities and U.S. organizations
on a project called African Universities Responding to AIDS.
Their primary goal was to develop undergraduate courses about
HIV/AIDS to be taught in universities in Kenya and Tanzania.
Making
Science Useful
When Fass visited one African university last
fall through the collaborative program, she came face-to
face with the effects of HIV/AIDS on people from all walks
of life.
The chair of the university’s biology department had
just died of AIDS, and, with no access to AIDS drugs, the
late professor’s colleagues were helpless to do anything
but wait for his wife to fall ill.
This brought home the
impact of the disease for everyone during Fass’ fourth
trip to the continent, when she participated in the university
project with five schools, while on sabbatical
from teaching at Beloit.
The collaborative effort was coordinated
by African Women in Science and Engineering, a non-governmental
organization, and received support from USAID, and the
Global Partners Program (funded by the Mellon Foundation).
Science
Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities
(SENCER), an Association of American Colleges and Universities
program, was a major force in coordinating the project.
“SENCER
is promoting the concept of teaching science through
an understanding of complex issues, and AIDS is certainly
one of them,” explains Fass. “It’s
an exciting model and the one we use at Beloit and in
BioQUEST. This way of teaching gives students the skills
to be educated citizens, to make wise decisions about
important issues.”
But taking an active teaching model like this to Africa
is far from easy, where a lack of resources perpetuates
the “lecturer in a position of unquestioned authority” approach.
“What we’ve done at Beloit is empower students to
be investigators,” Fass says. “So active
learning is based on engaging students in important questions
and challenges and helping them find tools to answer
those questions.”
This kind of teaching is something
Beloit leads in nationally—in part through its
curricular reform efforts in the sciences—but its
success depends upon student access to resources.
“We’re used to being able to ask questions and
say to our students, ‘Go, find the answers; comb the resources,’”
says Fass. “But in these very fine universities in Kenya
and Tanzania, they don’t have resources for students to
comb. There are very few books and computers. There is access
to the Internet, but there are maybe 12 computers for an entire
campus.”
As
she made presentations and offered formal and informal
training sessions in Africa, Fass practiced what she preached,
engaging
colleagues in the kinds of sessions
they could develop for their own students. At Egerton
University in Njoro, Kenya, for instance, Fass centered a discussion
around a graph that showed the prevalence of HIV/AIDS
among teenagers in the nearby town of Kisumu, leading
colleagues in an examination of why 32 percent of 19-year-old
girls there are HIV positive, while only about 10 percent
of boys are at the same age.
A complex web of reasons surfaced; some were biological: the
group determined that women may be more susceptible to HIV
than men before adolescence. Others factors reflected social
norms, like the fact that women tend to have relationships
with older men. “Young women without resources may accept
the affection of men who can provide them with school fees
or other necessities,” explains Fass. “Women
in some cultures don’t have the right to refuse sexual
advances or to insist that partners are protected, so differences
in the status of men and women can make girls more vulnerable.”
Prof.
Fass noticed that people are more willing to discuss AIDS-related
issues now, compared with her previous trips. “In 1999,
the president of Kenya declared HIV a national emergency,”
says Fass. “Prior to that, nobody was talking about it
at all.”
But stigma still abounds in many quarters.
“I had an interesting discussion with one lecturer [in
Tanzania] who said he could talk about body parts and functions
in English because it is the language of science, but it is
much harder for him to discuss this in Swahili, the personal
language,” says Fass. “He uses Swahili with his
children, and thus he can’t talk about HIV/AIDS comfortably
with them.”
While in Kenya,
Fass was also troubled by the degree to which stigma was
keeping people from including condoms in AIDS education programs.
People
were hesitant to talk about them, and she heard one person
say publicly that condoms were ineffective.
This did not
deter Fass.
“When I asked my hosts if they minded that I talked about
condoms, or if I pulled one out and showed it, they were delighted
because—while they are still uncomfortable—they
know that people need to start talking about it,” she
says.
Fass realizes that awareness and education are only one part
of a solution to the complex problem of HIV/AIDS in Africa.
“There’s patient education and there’s university
education, and I felt it necessary to make it clear to my colleagues
[in Africa] that the kind of university education we are talking
about isn’t going to solve the AIDS problem by changing
personal behavior,” says Fass. “But the people at
the universities are going to be the decision makers and policy
makers. They need to know what this disease is about, how it
has an impact on factory production and the educational system,
and how education in the schools is important to producing a
healthy work force. All these things are interrelated.”
A
Tide of Change
As ominous as many predictions about the African
AIDS epidemic are, Fass found signs of hope in Kenya and
Tanzania during her trip.
At Sokoine University of Agriculture
in Tanzania,
she attended an event sponsored by a local AIDS club that
used drama to communicate prevention information. “It was
clear that they were having open discussions about safe sex,
monogamy, and condoms, so things are progressing,” she
says.
Students at Egerton University presented a program
with skits and performances about HIV/AIDS vulnerability,
a high
point of which was a rap song, performed in English by
a young man, with the refrain, “We are all positive until we
have tested negative.”
Fass and her colleagues also
had a remarkable experience while visiting Miwani, a rural
area
of Kenya. Home to about 60,000, the place has been hard-hit
by AIDS, but people are fighting back.
Nearly
200 women wearing drab but official-looking dresses in varying
shades of forest green welcomed Fass and her entourage with
singing, dancing, blessings, and ululating. These community
health workers are part of a successful anti-AIDS movement in
the area that includes a clinic and training for respected local
villagers, who care for people with AIDS and their families.
“I was an honored guest,” Fass says of the visit,
“although, sadly, I didn’t come with the gum boots
and four-wheel drive vehicle they sorely needed. I did give
a short talk, emphasizing the impact of HIV/AIDS on women as
infected and affected, and the important role that community
care givers and women’s clubs are doing to reduce the
silence surrounding HIV/AIDS.”
Even
with successful grass roots efforts like these, Fass
believes a lack of funding remains one of
the greatest
hurdles to AIDS education in Africa.
“To mount a new course costs money and takes classrooms,”
says Fass. “If you try to teach all first-year students
at the university, that costs even more. So even if you think
education is very important, you still have to figure out how
to finance it and who is going to teach it.”
Fass’ work on the African universities project has officially
ended, but she plans to keep in touch with colleagues she met
through the program and help them forge other linkages with
scientists and resources in the United States. Professor Wanjiku
Chiuri, who worked with Fass as Egerton University’s dean
of the faculty of education, will visit Beloit as a Fulbright
Professor this fall. Among other things, she will join Fass
in team-teaching a First-Year Initiatives course for new Beloit
students called “Witness to AIDS.”
And, of course, Fass will continue teaching
about HIV/AIDS and other emerging diseases, inspiring
students to apply science to public health issues they feel
passionate
about. Many, like her, will find themselves drawn to
Africa. “When
you see the needs [in Africa] and you begin to understand
them, you can’t just sit quietly and do nothing,” Fass
says.
To read more about Prof. Fass’ work and the
African Universities Responding to AIDS project, visit
the Web at: http://biology.beloit.edu/fassm.
Reports from the
African universities, Fass’ trip journal, and photographs
can be found under the subheading “interests and
links.”
Africa Attracts Beloit Talent,
Compassion in Fight Against
AIDS
Long before $15 billion in new U.S. money was committed to
fighting AIDS worldwide, Beloiters found it impossible to ignore
the epidemic in Africa.
We caught up with several of them to talk about current and
past public health projects in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Mali, South
Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe to find out how their volunteer
work and research have changed their lives and the lives of
others.
- Zimbabwe
and Ivory Coast - Julia Shea Sullivan’97
- Ghana -
Stephanie Williams’01
- Mali - Becky
Giegerich’00
- Tanzania
- Geni Werner’04 and Ashley Weils’04
- South Africa
- Sandile Nunkuna’06
|
|
Into Africa
A
passion for educating people about HIV/AIDS
leads one Beloit professor to the place most adversely affected by
the disease.
|
Only five years before HIV emerged, Associate Professor of Biology Marion Field Fass was taught that the era of infectious diseases had ended. As graduate students in public health, she and her classmates learned that their futures would focus instead on chronic illnesses, like heart disease. Then came AIDS. “We were taught that infectious diseases weren’t important, and suddenly the world changed,” Fass says. “With AIDS, it’s been very clear that the model scientists and public health professionals had in the 1970s was wrong.” The impact of AIDS on science and public health became a powerful force to Fass, helping shape her reformist ideas about education and launching her on a mission to better understand the disease and to teach others about it. “HIV has demonstrated to me more than anything else that students need to develop skills they can adapt and apply to a changing world,” she says. In fact, Fass’ career at Beloit began with AIDS education. In 1990, she developed a global AIDS epidemic course for non-science majors as a part-time faculty member. Within a few years, she joined the faculty full-time and is now arguably Beloit’s expert on HIV/AIDS. Fass teaches microbiology and courses that deal with health and society, including that original course about AIDS—now called Emerging Diseases. Many activities from this class are included in a collection of educational activities called Microbes Count!, a book she recently edited with biology professors John Jungck and Ethel Stanley for the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium, a program based at Beloit that supports reform of the undergraduate biology curriculum. Fass’ teaching has influenced many students to devote their professional and volunteer efforts to improving public health. Like many of them, her passion for improving AIDS education has taken her as far as Africa, where she recently collaborated with a group of African universities and U.S. organizations on a project called African Universities Responding to AIDS. Their primary goal was to develop undergraduate courses about HIV/AIDS to be taught in universities in Kenya and Tanzania. Making Science Useful When Fass visited one African university last fall through the collaborative program, she came face-to face with the effects of HIV/AIDS on people from all walks of life. The chair of the university’s biology department had just died of AIDS, and, with no access to AIDS drugs, the late professor’s colleagues were helpless to do anything but wait for his wife to fall ill.
The collaborative effort was coordinated by African Women in Science and Engineering, a non-governmental organization, and received support from USAID, and the Global Partners Program (funded by the Mellon Foundation). Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities (SENCER), an Association of American Colleges and Universities program, was a major force in coordinating the project. “SENCER
is promoting the concept of teaching science through
an understanding of complex issues, and AIDS is certainly
one of them,” explains Fass. “It’s
an exciting model and the one we use at Beloit and in
BioQUEST. This way of teaching gives students the skills
to be educated citizens, to make wise decisions about
important issues.” “What we’ve done at Beloit is empower students to be investigators,” Fass says. “So active learning is based on engaging students in important questions and challenges and helping them find tools to answer those questions.”
“We’re used to being able to ask questions and say to our students, ‘Go, find the answers; comb the resources,’” says Fass. “But in these very fine universities in Kenya and Tanzania, they don’t have resources for students to comb. There are very few books and computers. There is access to the Internet, but there are maybe 12 computers for an entire campus.” As she made presentations and offered formal and informal training sessions in Africa, Fass practiced what she preached, engaging colleagues in the kinds of sessions they could develop for their own students. At Egerton University in Njoro, Kenya, for instance, Fass centered a discussion around a graph that showed the prevalence of HIV/AIDS among teenagers in the nearby town of Kisumu, leading colleagues in an examination of why 32 percent of 19-year-old girls there are HIV positive, while only about 10 percent of boys are at the same age. A complex web of reasons surfaced; some were biological: the group determined that women may be more susceptible to HIV than men before adolescence. Others factors reflected social norms, like the fact that women tend to have relationships with older men. “Young women without resources may accept the affection of men who can provide them with school fees or other necessities,” explains Fass. “Women in some cultures don’t have the right to refuse sexual advances or to insist that partners are protected, so differences in the status of men and women can make girls more vulnerable.”
“I had an interesting discussion with one lecturer [in Tanzania] who said he could talk about body parts and functions in English because it is the language of science, but it is much harder for him to discuss this in Swahili, the personal language,” says Fass. “He uses Swahili with his children, and thus he can’t talk about HIV/AIDS comfortably with them.” While in Kenya, Fass was also troubled by the degree to which stigma was keeping people from including condoms in AIDS education programs. People were hesitant to talk about them, and she heard one person say publicly that condoms were ineffective. This did not
deter Fass. Fass realizes that awareness and education are only one part of a solution to the complex problem of HIV/AIDS in Africa. “There’s patient education and there’s university education, and I felt it necessary to make it clear to my colleagues [in Africa] that the kind of university education we are talking about isn’t going to solve the AIDS problem by changing personal behavior,” says Fass. “But the people at the universities are going to be the decision makers and policy makers. They need to know what this disease is about, how it has an impact on factory production and the educational system, and how education in the schools is important to producing a healthy work force. All these things are interrelated.” A Tide of Change As ominous as many predictions about the African AIDS epidemic are, Fass found signs of hope in Kenya and Tanzania during her trip. At Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania, she attended an event sponsored by a local AIDS club that used drama to communicate prevention information. “It was clear that they were having open discussions about safe sex, monogamy, and condoms, so things are progressing,” she says. Students at Egerton University presented a program with skits and performances about HIV/AIDS vulnerability, a high point of which was a rap song, performed in English by a young man, with the refrain, “We are all positive until we have tested negative.” Fass and her colleagues also had a remarkable experience while visiting Miwani, a rural area of Kenya. Home to about 60,000, the place has been hard-hit by AIDS, but people are fighting back.
Even with successful grass roots efforts like these, Fass believes a lack of funding remains one of the greatest hurdles to AIDS education in Africa. “To mount a new course costs money and takes classrooms,” says Fass. “If you try to teach all first-year students at the university, that costs even more. So even if you think education is very important, you still have to figure out how to finance it and who is going to teach it.” Fass’ work on the African universities project has officially ended, but she plans to keep in touch with colleagues she met through the program and help them forge other linkages with scientists and resources in the United States. Professor Wanjiku Chiuri, who worked with Fass as Egerton University’s dean of the faculty of education, will visit Beloit as a Fulbright Professor this fall. Among other things, she will join Fass in team-teaching a First-Year Initiatives course for new Beloit students called “Witness to AIDS.” And, of course, Fass will continue teaching about HIV/AIDS and other emerging diseases, inspiring students to apply science to public health issues they feel passionate about. Many, like her, will find themselves drawn to Africa. “When you see the needs [in Africa] and you begin to understand them, you can’t just sit quietly and do nothing,” Fass says. To read more about Prof. Fass’ work and the African Universities Responding to AIDS project, visit the Web at: http://biology.beloit.edu/fassm. Reports from the African universities, Fass’ trip journal, and photographs can be found under the subheading “interests and links.”
Long before $15 billion in new U.S. money was committed to fighting AIDS worldwide, Beloiters found it impossible to ignore the epidemic in Africa. We caught up with several of them to talk about current and past public health projects in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Mali, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe to find out how their volunteer work and research have changed their lives and the lives of others.
|
|
RELATED
LINKS: "Last
Word," Beloit College Magazine, Summer 2003
Marion
Field Fass - Associate Professor of Biology |
