Victor - a victim of ignorance
I was surprised when the front door of the Reception room swung open and in walked my taxi driver. It was Saturday morning, the Marie Stopes International Ghana Accra Centre was about to close and the taxi driver had been settling himself into his seat for forty winks when I got out of the car.
Ostensibly, Victor (the taxi driver) had come into the Centre to give me my pen, ’which you left on your seat.’ As he had not brought with him the notebooks and bag I had also left on the seat, I thought this unusual.
My main reason for sitting in the reception was to directly steal every good idea the Team in Ghana have had – and to transplant them right into the new Marie Stopes International programme we were launching in Nigeria!
But Victor was having none of that. He sat down, casually flicked through a brochure on family planning methods and asked, ’what do they do here?’ Putting on my best promotional face and injecting enough energy into my delivery to launch a rocket, I told Victor about the importance of the work of Marie Stopes International in general and Marie Stopes International Ghana in particular.
I noticed, however, that the more enthusiastic I became, the more furrowed his brow. As I finished my by now somewhat limp delivery, Victor looked at me and said
‘I am a victim of ignorance’.
I asked him to explain.
Victor gave me his life story and I was struck by the fact that at an absurdly young age – he was about 15 – he ‘met a girl at school’ and ’one thing led to another – really, I had no idea what was happening’ and the unhappy couple (as he described them at that time) had twins.
Victor’s life changed almost overnight. From a promising student to essential 24/7 breadwinner, with no room to think about the future when the demands of the present were so pressing. The twins also took their economic toll and although Victor never descended into absolute poverty, he only just managed to keep himself and his family above the breadline.
Still looking incredibly young – those still had to be his first teeth – Victor looked at the Marie Stopes International brochures again and wished that they had been available when he had been a teenager. With the increasing ‘sexualisation’ of youths and adolescents, Victor felt that there was no time to waste in terms of getting the ‘safe sex’ message ‘out there’.
Victor was even aware that this age group suffers most from STIs, including HIV, as well as unsafe abortions and unwanted pregnancies. In his youth, it was ‘what to do about it’ which had always had Victor stumped. Until now.
Waving farewell to Victor (who by this time had a fistful of brochures to take home to his teenagers), I was struck by his curiosity and awareness of ‘reproductive rights’ and how – as a man – he was one of the many who, far from being an obstacle to ‘development’ wanted to embrace it fully.
Victor was living proof that the common belief that men want nothing other to maintain the ‘large family’ status quo in Africa is perhaps not as widespread as was once the case.