Chilo Ketlhoafetse struts around an eighth-grade classroom like the coolest guy in Botswana, warming the students up to talk about an awkward subject. He calls out "Nomhlaba!" and they respond "Auwe!" — nonsense words from a local childhood game. Soon he has the students clicking their fingers, dancing and following his every word.
Within an hour, the students at the Bakgatle Community Junior Secondary School in Mochudi are chanting the only message he wants to get across to them: "Older partners are riskier."
Ketlhoafetse is one of a dozen facilitators for Young 1ove, an organization with the sole aim of protecting girls from HIV by highlighting the risks of "sugar daddies" who trade gifts for sexual relationships. The group has a hard-won mandate from the Ministry of Education to take its sugar-daddy classes to every school in Botswana, which has the world's third highest level of HIV prevalence.
[For more of this story, written by Don Boroughs, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/go...y-from-sugar-daddies]
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