Crazy things happen when condoms cross cultures

Joy Lynn Alegarbes got a warning she would never forget last year as she began a journey to Ethiopia and Nigeria, where her mission literally was to save lives.

"I just want you to be careful," Franck Delores, executive director of the Condom Project, told her. "The baggage handlers usually steal anything of value out of your luggage before you can claim it."

Alegarbes hand-carried eight laptop computers and six digital cameras worth about $20,000 onto the plane in Washington. By the time she arrived in Ethiopia, 1,000 Crown condoms, the hottest-selling prophylactic on the market, were missing from her luggage.

In an instant, Alegarbes realized she had protected the wrong thing.

Crown condoms cost only 89 cents each, but in Alegarbes' line of work--the emerging international effort to demystify the use of condoms--they can save a human life.

"Hopefully, someone would (have gotten) to use them," said Alegarbes, who was traveling with workers for the Condom Project.

The Condom Project is a nonprofit group established in 2003 by educators, activists and artists to demystify condoms in countries where HIV and AIDS devastate poor, uneducated people.

Alegarbes and others on the front lines of the effort are finding that it takes a mix of creativity, patience and humor to overcome taboos and convince people with different cultural traditions that something as cheap and simple to use as a condom doesn't cause HIV or AIDS (as some believe), but instead protects them.

"It's not an easy process. Each country has its contextual differences," said Sarah Wyss, communications director for Population Services International, an effort similar to the Condom Project. PSI is financed by the U.S. government.

A 2002 PSI report on condom use in sub-Saharan Africa found that "a dislike of condoms" was given as the most frequent reason for not using them. “Unavailability of condoms” was rarely cited as a reason.

"Behavior change campaigns encouraging sexually experienced people to accurately assess their personal risk of acquiring HIV should be complemented with marketing campaigns emphasizing the positive attributes of condoms," the report concluded.

But condom marketers are coming up against a hail of taboos and myths.

"Sex" and "condoms" and other words commonly used to educate people on the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS are taboo in many African countries.

"If people can't say 'condoms,'" Alegarbes asked, "they can't say it in their local languages, then how are you going to talk to them about safer sex?"

In Ethiopia, Alegarbes met people who thought condoms spread HIV. In Nigeria, Alegarbes told a focus-group meeting to always keep condoms in air-conditioned rooms. Her audience protested. They didn't have air-conditioned rooms. So she told them to use refrigerators. "What if we have no refrigerator?" one man replied.

"Coming from America," Alegarbes said, "it was hard to imagine someone without a refrigerator."

Condom marketers are also at odds with politicians and religious leaders.

Bishops in Tanzania last month voiced opposition to a primary-school curriculum that introduces young students to the use of condoms. Uganda’s leaders are bickering over whether condoms are moral or not. Meanwhile, AIDS claims about 7,000 deaths daily in Africa--about half the total number of AIDS deaths worldwide.

To save lives, marketers often find humorous ways to break through these cultural barriers.

In Nigeria, Alegarbes dressed a condom on a ketchup bottle and turned one into a hair tie using only her teeth--all on national television. She also personally placed a condom art-pin on President Olusegun Obasanjo's chest pocket.

"I still can't believe it," Alegarbes, a former cast member of the Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom, wrote in an e-mail message from Africa. She has done similar stunts on MTVU, Oxygen Channel and the Discovery Channel series "Sex Drive."

In Kenya, PSI subsidizes a condom brand called Trust. "When you enter the country, you see the brand," said Wyss, who visited Kenya in March. "It has become a household name."

The Condom Project gives video-editing equipment and laptops to nonprofit groups in Africa and Asia to make 30-second, voiceless, nonsexual, nonsensical videos about condoms.

Film segments often document progress that comes slowly and awkwardly, but it is progress nonetheless.

In India, a man who can't find one of his socks after rummaging about in his bedside dresser picks up a condom and wears it as a sock. In another video, a girl bites the ring off a condom and asks a friend to use the remainder to tie her hair into a knot at the back.

In Nigeria, a man who fails to persuade a woman at a store to allow him to walk away with a glass bottle after buying a Coke, pours the soda into a condom, dips the straw into it and walks away sipping from the condom.

In Ethiopia, a girl who fails to pull a pillow from under a snoring male partner's head reaches for a condom on the bedside table and inflates it to make a pillow.

Wherever the locally produced videos were screened, the viewers were amazed, Alegarbes said. Some viewers said, "You see, he put the condom on his mouth?"

"All they are saying is the word 'condom,'" Alegarbes said, chuckling. "At least, they're saying it."

E-mail: bdm2106@columbia.edu