17-year-old Sukrit Duansung is a sex education peer educator at Si Sa Ket Wittayalai School, and will soon travel to Mexico City to take part in the 17th World Aids Conference
If public speaking is a bad dream to many people, public speaking on the subject of sex has got to be a nightmare.
After all, it's traditional discomfort in talking about the topic that has always made teaching sex education in schools a challenge.
For years (and in some schools still today), lessons steered clear of candid discussion about condoms and sexual orientation, and centred instead on more chaste and scientific matters _ like bodily hygiene and personal development.
Yet, while these more frank lessons may lead some to blush, for 17-year-old Sukrit Duansung, a grade 11 student and sex education peer educator at Si Sa Ket Wittayalai School, spreading them is a reality and a responsibility that he's comfortable with.
So much so, in fact, that the grade 11 student will soon take up the task on a global stage.
At the end of the month, Sukrit will travel to Mexico City to represent Thai youth and take part in the 17th World Aids Conference _ a six-day event anticipated to draw 25,000 health workers, activists and journalists.
Sukrit is one of 13 youth delegates worldwide selected by Plan, the international community development organisation, to attend the conference and participate in the pre-conference Youth Forum.
The forum, which runs a week before the conference will bring together hundreds of children from around the world to share their experience and ideas on how to solve HIV/Aids-related problems, and to prepare a youth message to be delivered to the conference's adult audience.
Sukrit was selected as Thailand's delegate because of his role as a student leader and sex education peer educator.
''We use several criteria in recruiting the youth delegate such as their interest in HIV/Aids issues, their experience in working to solve the problem including their self esteem, confidence, leadership skill, Sukrit has passed them all,'' says Panus Rattakitvijun Na Nakorn, Plan's HIV/Aids Programme Coordinator in Thailand.
As one of his school's sex education peer educators, Sukrit has been specially trained to provide information and answers to classmates and young community members that may have questions about the subject.
The peer-to-peer programme is a central element of the life skills curriculum that Plan has sponsored in 16 schools in Si Sa Ket and Chiang Rai provinces. As part of the programme, teachers and young leaders like Sukrit learn how to educate young people on matters of sexual and reproductive health, gender roles and rights, emotions and social relationships, and general skills for growing up.
A large part of the curriculum also focuses on HIV/Aids prevention and protection, as well as ways to relate to and support people living with the condition.
Before the life skills training programme was started in his school, Sukrit's sex education had been limited to classroom lessons on hygiene and at age 15, a stint at the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security's life skills training camp.
''I had heard about sex and things, but I sort of feared it and things like Aids before. Adults make the lessons frightening,'' he says.
He says Si Sa Ket Wittayalai's life skills programme has made the subject of sex less taboo and more real, and raised his awareness about the risks and consequences that come with it.
He considers this confidence and knowledge a positive and empowering thing for his peers, a group that has become increasingly at risk for suffering such consequences.
Youth are high risk group
According to many that work in the field, it is no longer prostitutes, but youth _ along with men who have sex with men and housewives _ who in recent years have become the primary groups at risk of HIV/Aids in Thailand. Recent Bangkok University research found that 80% of Thai youth do not wear a condom before having sex..
Such trends among young people are largely what inspired Sukrit, already a very busy student leader (he is president of his student body, his school's anti-drug group and affiliated with a number of other organisations), to get involved with Plan's peer education programme.
''I see how some of my friends are fearless and curious even when they know the consequences. I want to emphasise what I have learned so they are more aware of the risks to their health,'' he says.
Sukrit stresses that, as a peer educator, it is not his role to judge or dictate his peers' actions, but to inform them of the full range of choices and alternatives and let them decide for themselves.
Sukrit has found that his friends and classmates are very receptive to his message, and are usually more open to hearing it from him than from adults.
His audiences are often inquisitive, too, and Sukrit says he is comfortable and unembarrassed fielding the questions so long as they do not pry into his personal life (a tendency of younger interrogators, he says).
While Sukrit does what he can to get the word out about responsible life habits, he has specific concerns that he hopes others in the community can help address.
For example, too often, he says, youth are left alone or unsupervised in the afterschool hours. ''No one knows what they are up to,'' he says, adding that if parents or school officials take a more active role some of the trouble and behaviours that come in idle time at the end of the school day could be prevented.
He also worries about the widening and weakening bonds between children and their parents, and the effects it has on young people's behaviour. ''Youth listen to their friends more than their parents,'' he says.
Part of this may be due to the awkward and often alarmist way he says adults often communicate about relationships and sex with young people. He encourages parents to be more open and realistic in discussing such subjects with their children.
Sukrit speaks of an instance in which one of his friends was reprimanded by his parents for mentioning an interest in a girlfriend: ''They told him he was too young, and that the subject was not to be discussed,'' he says.
Such parental discomfort or ultra-conservativism, he says, will only make the situation worse. ''Parents need to show they can be trusted,'' he adds.
(For his own part, Sukrit says he has no problem communicating with his parents, but that he is also single and has no potentially dicey personal issues to share.)
More often than not, he says, young people deserve more trust and credit than they're given. For all the concern that parents sometimes have over boyfriends, girlfriends and the internet, Sukrit says most of his peers behave responsibly.
Along with more open discussion, he believes some generational distance could also be bridged with a stronger national emphasis on family values.
Sukrit plans to take these messages as well as his reviews and ideas regarding in-school sex education and peer educator programmes to share in Mexico City.
''Youth-friendly approaches to sex education will reduce HIV,'' he says confidently.
He adds: ''Sex education is about learning life skills, not just sex. It is really about learning about how to live, especially when there are obstacles. The benefit is studying how to cope with emotions and problems.''
He has also spent the last few weeks preparing for his presentation at the conference by consulting with other Thai students around the country and collecting their experiences.
Even after his trip to Mexico, it's not likely things will slow down for Sukrit anytime soon. In addition to all of his student activities, he expects a busy year, preparing for his university entrance exams. He hopes to attend Kon Kaen University, study political science, and maybe one day, become a politician.
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