Cambodia cyclo riders peddle safe-sex message
Tuesday, 30 November 2004
Cambodia cyclo riders peddle safe-sex message
PHNOM PENH (AlertNet) - Two blindfolded men stumble across a room, holding freshly opened condoms. A few paces away, another pair of blindfolded men hold out realistic-looking wooden penises.
The room fills with laughter as the condom holders lurch toward their partners, then clumsily try to work the latex sheaths down over the phalluses.
“Make sure you wait until it’s fully erect before putting on the condom,” chides a policeman, who has overseen such exercises before. “If you don’t, the condom could fly off.”
He underlines his point with a dramatic arm motion.
The session is part of an HIV/AIDS “peer education” programme for Phnom Penh’s “cyclo riders” – drivers of the ubiquitous bicycle passenger carriages seen all over Cambodia’s bustling capital.
The riders attending this six-day course have been chosen as “core trainers” who will go onto the streets to teach their peers, who will then, hopefully, go on to educate the rest of city’s roughly 3,000 cyclo riders.
On hand to aid the instruction are several female social workers who deal with the city’s prostitutes, whom many cyclo riders are known to frequent.
The course is modeled on similar programs for other groups that have been successful in the past - the military, police, garment workers and even the cyclo riders’ close cousins, the “moto-taxi” (motorcycle taxi) drivers.
But unlike these other groups, cyclo riders present special challenges.
In addition to being among the lowest income earners, they are unusually transient and poorly educated. They have no fixed workplaces, belong to no unions, and often do not even have a roof over their heads at night.
SPECIAL DIFFICULTIES
More than these other groups, cyclo riders embody the difficulties of combating HIV that accompany Cambodia’s rapid urbanisation.
“We have found that these men are a mobile population who don’t permanently stay in one place,” said the program organiser, Song Ngak of the non-government organisation Family Health International (FHI).
“They come into the city after the harvest is over when they have no job. They don’t bring their families and so often they have sex outside of marriage. It is when people are away from home that they are most susceptible to HIV/AIDS.”
While Cambodia has the highest rate of HIV infection in Asia, the country has seen many successes in recent years. New infections have dropped off dramatically as public education and a national “100-percent condom use” campaign have taken hold.
About 2.6 percent of the population is HIV-positive, down from about four percent in 1997, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.
Yet new challenges are emerging and many groups remain at risk.
While there is little data on cyclo riders, health experts fear that a significant number could be infected.
“There are no figures, but I think the infection rate is high because many come here without families and are involved with sex workers,” said Chawalit Natpratan, FHI’s Cambodia director.
Studies of moto-taxi drivers, who earn more than cyclo riders but share similar working conditions, suggest cause for alarm.
According to a 2001 study by FHI, 20 percent of moto-taxi drivers had had sex with a prostitute during the previous month. For the previous year, the figure was 32 percent, while 68 percent had had sex with a prostitute at least once.
FREQUENT SEX
Preap Saron, a 27-year-old participant in the peer education course who has been a cyclo rider for about three years, estimated that about 20 percent of Phnom Penh cyclo riders visit sex shops at least occasionally.
The cost for sex at such establishments is about $1, he said, compared with the riders’ monthly income of $30 to $40.
Last June, Preap himself became concerned that he might be HIV positive.
“I decided I needed a test after having sex with a prostitute during which my condom broke,” he said.
The test came out negative, and now Preap says he no longer visits Phnom Penh’s sex shops.
Another participant, 33-year-old Lov Saven, who has been a cyclo rider for four years and is married with three children, says he does not visit sex shops himself, but recalls a fellow rider known as a brothel regular, who boasted about his sexual appetite.
“Then he became very ill, lost a lot of weight and became thin,” said Lov. “He was forced to move out of the compound where many riders slept, since the others were afraid of becoming infected from a mosquito bite.”
Three months ago, the rider died, Lov said.
The fact that many riders sleep alongside each other in the compounds where they rent their vehicles works in favor of peer education, FHI’s Song said, since it gives them a place to share information.
But many other riders do not share such quarters, stretching out instead in their machines on street corners or in parks at night. Those who do, said Song, are most at risk, since this is where they are likely to encounter “freelance” sex workers.
Such freelancers tend to charge less for their services, be in poorer health and be less concerned about condom use than their counterparts working in sex shops, Song said.
This makes it critical that peer educators make the effort to seek out those riders who are most isolated and difficult to reach, he added.
“When the social network is strong, the programme works well,” Song said. “A lot depends on how strong the network is.”
