STD ASSASSINS

I’VE HEARD that there’s a time and a place for everything… and it’s called university. Your university years — while of course chock full of intellect expanding and higher learning — are also supposed to be the wildest years of your life. It’s the time when you meet and mingle with all kinds of different and strange people, make new friends, learn to live on your own, study hard, party harder, experiment with a variety of mind-altering substances, and come into your own. Universities are very aware that when you put a couple thousand hot-blooded young people from all over the globe living in close proximity and sharing space in dormitories, libraries, classes and pubs, people are bound to come together in one way or another, and as a result, the school wanted their sexually-active students to be educated, prepared and protected during their time there.

At the university campus where I lived in Toronto many years ago, it was not like how it is here, where condoms are locked away in a hidden glass container in the pharmacy like a dirty secret. No, there were condoms everywhere! A variety of multi-coloured (and often flavoured!) condoms were always included in the yearly moving-in package, along with pens, pencils, calendars, rulers, boxes of Kraft Dinner and laundry soap. You could buy condoms in the vending machines in the bathrooms, or students could go down to the health office and walk out with a sack of free condoms if they liked. In many dormitories, there were condom baskets or condom boxes in the bathrooms, hallways or staircases, just in case someone ever needed one but was too embarrassed to go to the health office to ask. The fact is that most young people go a little crazy when they are living on their own away from home for the first time. Young people tend to foolishly believe that they are young and invincible and can get away with anything, so they take stupid risks.

They think, “Ah that’ll never happen to me,” or “only people who sleep around get diseases,” not realising that your very first encounter can leave you with a STD that will be with you for life. This is why one year the heads of the dorm in which I lived organised a wonderful year-long game called STD Assassins. All of the residents had to pull a piece of paper from a bag, and on that piece of paper was the name of an STD — HIV, herpes, genital warts, pubic lice, gonorrhea, chlamydia, hepatitis, syphilis, vaginitis, scabies and pelvic inflammatory disease — and that became your STD for the year. (Mine was gonorrhea!) Now, there were a number of rules for STD Assassins. Firstly, for the rest of the semester, you must always carry your STD on you (as in the piece of paper with your STD). Secondly, you must always carry a condom somewhere on your body, whether it be in your bag or jacket or pocket. Thirdly, no matter where you were on campus — whether you were in a party or on the Stairmaster at the gym – if you ran into an Assassin with an STD and you didn’t have a condom on you, you “caught” their STD.

The person would then hand over their STD to you, and they would be STD-free until they lapsed and someone caught them without a condom. At first everyone thought it was really silly — who walks to an exam with a condom in their pocket? So for the first few weeks, everyone was very forgetful and would get caught in the hallway, or coming out of the bathroom, or having a midnight snack without having a condom on them, and they kept getting STDs and spreading them around to each other. But then STD Assassins became a fierce competition — we started stalking each other around campus, peeking around corners to pounce on an unsuspecting target. People would even form alliances and keep an eye out for someone who they knew was particularly forgetful, and give them four STDs at the same time! No matter what we were doing or where we were going, we all started carrying a condom as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

After months of hunting each other down while trying to stay clean, we had all learnt a vital lesson that would stick with us for life — that condoms are like a VISA card… “don’t leave home without it!” At the end of the year, the people who were completely STD-free were given a prize, and the person who accumulated the most STDs shamefully won the prize of the Most Dirty Student award.  STD Assassins was a very successful exercise because universities tend to be rampant with STDs, so the game taught us how important it is to always, always, always be protected and never, never, never take a chance with sexual health. It also taught us that no matter what a person looks like or who they are, you simply can’t tell whether they have an STD or not. I can promise you that everyone that took part in the game has carried these lessons with them well into their adulthood, because once it is learnt, it is very, very difficult to go back to being careless and risky. We all know that many of our high schools here at home are full of STDs, and this quite likely also applies to the University of the West Indies.

While abstinence should be taught and encouraged — as it already is and has been done for endless generations — I believe that in this day and age it is of the utmost importance to also teach young people how to protect themselves. Perhaps the real problem is that this new wave of sexually transmitted diseases, and HIV/AIDS in particular, is something that is particularly crucial for my generation, because older people tend to tell me that when they were young, the only thing they ever worried about was getting pregnant. They grew up not knowing about the various STDs or condom use and they went to bed not worrying about AIDS, which perhaps explains their reluctance to teach these lessons to my generation. But things change, times change… and considering we have the highest AIDS rate next to Sub-Saharan Africa, are we ever going to be ready to change with the times? emilymdickson@yahoo.com