As part of The Great American Condom Campaign, I donated 200 condoms to my friend Alexis Dennis, for an alternative spring break trip to the Mississippi Delta to teach sex education in the rural community of Sunflower.  Alexis founded this trip as a special project of the Black Student Movement at UNC.  Alexis is a junior, and led the trip for the first time last spring.

The second batch of participants is headed off this weekend. I sat down with her last week to talk about the importance of the trip and the need for more medically accurate information in rural communities.

Lee: When did you first have the idea to lead this trip?

Alexis: During the summer after my first-year of college, I spent the summer teaching with the Sunflower County Freedom Project in Mississippi, an educational nonprofit that uses the Civil Rights movement to inspire its students. My co-workers and I quickly noticed several things:

First, many students did not understand or know how to vocalize when they were being sexually harassed. Secondly, many of the kids did not know how to take care of themselves during puberty. We decided to spend a couple of hours one day to teach the high-lights of sex education.

To our surprise, the lesson wound up taking six hours! The students had little understanding of their basic reproductive anatomy because they were not taught this information in schools. After leaving, I decided I wanted to find a way to go back and try to fill in some of these imperative gaps in understanding. 



Lee: What can trip participants expect?

Alexis: University students spend half of their time getting to know the area and learning about the history, culture, and social issues of Mississippi. After taking trips in the morning, students will teach a health and self camp with the students at the Sunflower Freedom Project. We teach goal setting, values, communication, anatomy, STIs/HIV, information about contraception, and the difference between healthy and abusive relationships, amongst other topics.

Lee: How do you plan to use the condoms given from the Great American Condom Campaign?

Alexis: We will distribute the condoms with the students we work with. During our session on contraception, we teach students about HIV and sexually transmitted infections. We also teach them how to use condoms correctly, and allow them to practice on bananas. We also discuss how to talk with your partner about using condoms, and the importance of saying no to a sexual relationship if your partner will not use a condom. This year we are going to leave condoms with the students. Being in rural Mississippi, they have limited access to contraception, so we think it is important to try to eliminate some of these barriers. 



Alexis’ trip is an important step forward in taking our message about  healthy sexuality to communities that don’t have as much access to information. In speaking with Alexis, I was really impressed with the importance she placed on cultural sensitivity. She commented that it was important to “make sure that the lessons that we teach suit the needs of the community we are working in. The camp incorporates topics about values, goal setting, and how people of your race are represented in the media, for example. We use a holistic approach, which I think is important in helping youth understand, gain control over, and take responsibility for their own bodies and health.”

Good luck to all the students from UNC headed down to Mississippi this week!