Do you think we have enough trained counselors on health, domestic violence and other family issues in the country?
We have very few counsellors in the country and where available, they may be expensive. More so, some counselors are trained abroad and they come back to counsel here, not minding our culture and irrespective of the situation which differs from what they are trained abroad.
For instance a teenager that is being abused today or has problems with his parents will be confused on where to go for counselling. They may only be able to get counseling through their Sunday school teacher or religious clerics.
What do you advise people in need of counseling in this country to do?
To be a counselor you have to go through a professional course. Parents should look around their environment and they will find a nice person. They should study such a person and let them mentor their children. They as parents should also mentor their children every day. I developed the interest in counseling because I have to mentor my children. I have counseled a lot of teenagers and discovered that they are in dire need of parental closeness and mentorship. If the adults behave well children will behave well too.
With your interaction with teenagers, what do you think are their major problems?
Their major problem is peer pressure. For example parents don’t commend, discuss or show love to their children, and they may start looking for acceptance from their peer group. Also when a mother gives birth she is supposed to breast feed the child and bond with him or her. But some mothers don’t breast feed thereby reducing the bond between them.
When the child is a year old, she takes the child to a day care and wakes him or her at 6 a.m. Then she goes to work very early and returns very late, this affects the child. When both parents are not close to their children and have too high expectations it affects children and leads them to valuing their peer group than their parents.
Parents should also know that child A is different from child B. Parenting is a task given to us. It is not to show off to other people that you have children. Though we know that some children still turn out bad in spite of good parenting, most children learn and return to the right path with good parenting. And if they don’t you know that your conscience will be clear, that you have done your own part and lived up to your responsibility.
How do you think sexual violence among the youth can be addressed?
There was a time when we were doing something at National Youth Service Corporation (NYSC) camp and corps members were empowered to go and enlighten secondary school students on negotiation and refusal skills. We discovered that the self esteem of many of the girls are so low that they keep following the boys even when they are not interested.
We enlightened the girls not to go into dark corners with boys. And when they are with a boy and he is touching them in places they should just leave there. It is also good to tell the boy his limits at the beginning of the relationship. A girl that is taught the importance of self esteem, preserving her purity and protecting herself from infections will fight for her right because it is her body.
But there are times the girls are raped and they will rather die than tell anybody. Once they complain the society will blame them. Even her own mother will ask ‘why did you go there before the man raped you’ or ‘what were you wearing?’
Girls wearing miniskirts, trousers and even those who cover themselves are being raped but man is not supposed to be an animal. If the girls are raped and they don’t come out to say it, you cannot force it and if they say it and people start laughing at them, it further brings down her self esteem and some of them even commit suicide and the boys go free.
While we were in secondary school when a girl gets pregnant, she is expelled while the boy responsible stays back in school so the society does not have much interest about women.
As someone working in an organisation that is HIV focused what is your advise for families when a relative is infected?
It has been an issue because of the stigma associated with it, and this is borne out of ignorance. Families should not stigmatise infected persons because when someone knows he or she will be stigmatised by the family, he wouldn’t inform them of his status, he will hide it and then infect the others.
He or she will also hide to take drugs but when they know the family will show them love, they will open up. Such family members help remind the patients to take their drugs nad help protect themselves because they are aware.
We have seen cases where a man is positive and the women will still marry him or the woman is positive and the man will still stay with her. We even teach couples how not to get the other infected when one is positive, and care for themselves when both are infected.
In what ways can the wellbeing of families be improved?
You know from generations to generations, mothers have always advised their daughters to bath with hot water when they give birth, but do you know it is not scientific? Infact it harms some babies not to talk of the woman falling into the hot water.
There is need for enlightenment. Government should make more efforts towards educating the populace because it is very important. It is important to educate on prevention than treatment. It is not enough to give people in rural areas mosquito nets in order to prevent malaria. Rather it should include enlightenment on cleaning their environment.
Even if one goes to the village with 10 million naira to treat an ailment before two months it has finished but when you get educational materials like films and enlighten them, you see changes if not immediately, in ten years the village would have changed.
People go through university without knowing the first aid to give to someone who collapses, educating the people does not mean using big jargons or grammar.
On the side of the health workers, they need to create time to communicate properly with the people. They should explain drugs and the side effects to patients and not just be in a hurry. Health workers or hospital workers have a master-servant relationship with their patients. It is not supposed to be so. There should be a health worker-patient relationship.
Parents on their part, should love their children and plan for them. They should plan with experts too. For instance when they what to have a baby they can seek expert advise. When people go to the hospital, they should ask questions. It is their right. If a woman who is pregnant for the first time goes for ante-natal care in a hospital and the doctor is not ready to answer her questions, she should not go there again.
One important thing is time. Children have so many questions so parents should try to answer them because if they don’t someone else will.
