Maia Abroad: UWC Waterford

Today, Waterford welcomed visitors from the Swaziland Ministry of Health and Rock of Hope to hold a queer-specific sex-ed talk and provide some information about the HIV epidemic within eSwatini. Organizing this talk has been somewhat of a pet project of mine for a while. Last term, I got picked as one of the heads of Pride Week here. During the interview that last year’s heads held, they asked what ideas I had to bring to the event, and this was one of the main ones. When it comes to sex-ed, WK mainly preaches abstinence. This is due to the fact that sex on campus is strictly banned, and with the new laws in eSwatini, sex under 18 is considered statutory rape. However, this becomes somewhat unrealistic when you shove 600 teenagers on a remote mountaintop in a high-pressure environment. I’m lucky to have been educated partly in Canada, where sex-ed, (at least in my province in British Columbia) is comprehensive, fairly inclusive, and begins at a young age and continues throughout...

When I came out to my parents as bisexual, we were in South Africa. South Africa was the third country in the world to legalize equal marriage. When I began to embrace my identity as a queer woman and became involved with the community, it was in my city of Vancouver. Canada's prime minister frequently comes to our annual Pride march. June is a month of rainbows and flamboyant celebrations and affirmations of #loveislove written on everything from yoga mats to lattes. I'm now spending my first June, my first Pride in eSwatini. At one of the talks we ran during Pride Week, a guest speaker explained a custom. If you are found out to be a homosexual, she told us, you would be sent away from your community, and told to cross five rivers before you could stop. eSwatini is a very small country. If you can cross the required number of rivers and find a community, you would then have to explain why you had to leave your last home. If they find out that you are a homosexual, they won...

I’ve been taking a lot of naps lately. It’s an ongoing struggle to feel less guilty about this. A few blog posts ago I wrote about my cancer’s father diagnosis. He’s doing great – his radiation treatment is well under way and he doesn’t seem to be having too many side effects. Regardless, that was stressful. Shortly after, I ended up getting mono, (I’ve heard way too many jokes about my love life of late) and that ended up meaning I pretty much spent the last two weeks of term two in a fog, along with a fair chunk of my holiday. At school, they told me I had laryngitis, gave me broad-spectrum antibiotics and some mildly dodgy cough medicine, and sent me to class. I don’t think I really remember much of what we learned in the last two weeks, and I pretty much passed out every time I sat down on my bed. I’m still really tired. The fatigue aspect of mono is affecting me more than I thought it would, and it brings back bad memories of the fatigue I experienced when I had Zika virus. ...