Kenya Red Cross Sees Shift in Attitude Toward Safe Sex

March 25, 2011

On Friday, the Kenya Red Cross delivered an emergency shipment of male and female condoms to the people of Mashambani, a village in the Isiolo region in the Eastern Province of Kenya. Nearly 90,000 condoms were delivered to the rural area, where the shortage of prophylactics was creating what observers deemed a health emergency.

According to Kenya Red Cross spokesperson Nelly Mulaka, the residents of Mashambani were resorting to extreme measures in order to protect themselves.

“They were using polythene papers, some of them were recycling condoms, some of them were using cloths and so on. Those are methods that cannot work,” Mulaka said.

Such methods are troubling, especially in a country in the midst of an HIV epidemic. According to the United Nations, as many as 1.5 million Kenyans were living with HIV in 2009, exactly the same number infected in 2001.

But according to Mulaka, the case of Mashambani presents cause for hope. Mulaka explained it was the residents of the rural village who reported the shortage of condoms to the Red Cross, demonstrating the effectiveness of HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns over the past few years.

“We are happy when we see such people coming up to demand, to ask,” Mulaka added. “Because for a long time, when we began the project, we had a problem. At the beginning people could not stand listening to this kind of information but with time they started slowly accepting this.”