We are experiencing a shortage of knowledge, not condoms

Times are hard, I whispered to myself as I walked out of the supermarket with my shopping, comprising the usual household supplies and three other items that a young lady at the till had found very expensive.

“Actually, they are nine,” I had told her after she asked why I was paying so much for them.

The cash register’s monitor had listed my loot as ‘three items’, but I was looking at them through nine neatly sealed wrappers.

“Four hundred and sixty shillings for only three items?” she had asked in wonderment, her voice betraying surprise that bordered on horror, as if I had committed a papal sin by spending — as we write in news stories — a whopping Sh460 on just three packets of latex sheaths made popular by Durex, the French company.

She had tilled the bulk of my shopping, but I had to go back to the shelves to pick up the condoms. From their position at the supermarket, I would not have been surprised if I had been asked for a national ID card before I paid for them.

Sensing the disgust in her voice, I tried to crack her up by telling her what happened when I went to pick them up.

“I did not know where they were and I was about to ask a female attendant, but I realised she was the wrong person because she was pregnant.”

Either she did not understand the joke, or she was just disgusted that I was joyfully spending Sh460 on only three packets of condoms and gleefully chatting her up in our prim and proper society where sex (talk) is taboo, despite the fact that several studies have revealed that virginity is a virtue found only in imported olive oil, and that morning-after pills sell faster than most basic commodities during school holidays.

Either times are hard, or we just love to exercise our seminal rights. Maybe we never want anything to come between us and our partners, and that is why we buy more contraception than protection.

I was still thinking about these hard times when I came across an item on prime time news: a man washing a condom to reuse because, he explained, they were scarce, expensive or available only in a faraway town. Really?

As a journalist and a protection freak, this was a wonderful story. The man — and his neighbours who confessed to using cellophane paper, pieces of cloth or even sharing the washed condoms — was heeding family planning and HIV/Aids awareness campaigns.

Wonderful. Less than 24 hours later, the Afya House mandarins and other NGO-wallahs were hollering about a shortage of condoms in Kenya, bawling that we need billions in aid to offset the shortage; and that condom use has increased by so much over the years that we cannot meet the demand.

It did not take long before the story became a trending topic on Twitter (#BecauseofCondomShortage), with Kenyans giving all sorts of funny and humorous scenarios of cause and effect.

Inasmuch as this was a wonderful story, it was old news to me. Many years ago, I did a story on the same after I came across street families and commercial sex workers in Eldoret recycling condoms or using cellophane papers for protection.

By then, 2010 was still a mirage, a statistic that came in such quotations as “at the current awareness and prevalence rates, 77 per cent of HIV and Aids cases will be in the rural areas by the year 2010.”

It was at a time when HIV and Aids awareness campaigns were at their peak; and Nascop, Nephak, Wofak, Tapwak, UNAIDS and many other local and international NGOs and agencies were not only holding training workshops and seminars all over the place, but also distributing literature warning people against unprotected sex and risqué behaviour.

Triple Darkness phenomenon

It was during one of these seminars that I learnt of two minor problems and a phenomenon called Triple Darkness that were responsible for high prevalence and infection rates despite the availability of information.

A Tanzanian national had asked about the first step towards successful condom use, and all participants talked about unwrapping and wearing.

He said the first step was having the condom. That was about access... or lack thereof.

On the Triple Darkness bit, he reckoned that couples, who do not even have children, locked themselves in, switched off the lights, went under the covers and started fumbling and bumbling with a condom before tearing or puncturing it with their teeth or nails, then wearing it all the same — or wearing it improperly — and bursting it up in the process.

Grope back to sleep

On realising the “accident”, they do not stop and start fumbling for another condom, but just continue while hoping that the other partner in crime does not know what had happened. Since they are in the dark, the man would slip away, dump it and grope back to sleep.

Now NGO, CBO and MoH mandarins are falling all over themselves to reach the disadvantaged (don’t we just love this word) communities, as if condoms suddenly fell from the sky immediately the news item was aired.

They can flood the country with condoms, but as long as people are not aware about proper usage and storage, they are wasting their time and our money.

Like the Constitution, which I likened to the condom in August last year, both are of no use to us if we do not apply them well — and what we are experiencing is not a shortage of condoms, but a shortage of knowledge.