Life skills
Thus it is clear that for some learners the pioneer’s role extended beyond guidance about sexual matters to life style issues more generally:
| a19g "that being a teenager is an unstable state" |
| a35g "About the life skills and how to prevent deadly sicknesses like Aids/HIV" |
| a36g "How to deal with sexual relationships and other teenage related problems." |
| b20g "they also taught how to cope with exams" |
| f2g "differentiate between the right and the wrong thing" |
| g39g "What we would experience in future and to be ready for whatever happens" |
A common need expressed by learners was for pioneers to even further extend their teaching towards broader life-style issues (e.g. a44g "Career guidance, life skills and about substance abuse"). The need for input about relationships with girlfriends and boyfriends was often mentioned:
| g28g "I want her to talk to us about relationships with our partners" |
| i44g "How to have a boyfriend/guy without a fight" |
| i17g "I want to find out about living a boyfriend without any fights" |
| i31g "when do you have to be in a relationship" |
| f15g "I want to know more information about a girl and a boy falling in love what did they have to do about sex having no sex or what?" |
Some learners were interested in typical teenage issues such as how to conduct oneself at parties or during one’s first sexual experience:
| a34g "Self control, how to behave yourself if you at a party" |
| i45g "If I go with a boy to the party what must I do. I like to know is if I don’t love a person and he dont understand what shall I do" |
| c37g "I want to no how going to have sex what are you going to do first" |
| h31b "I want to learn about for some boys when th say they are honey" |
| h12g "Sexual Intercourse" |
| i25g "sexual intercourse" |
A common issue among learners was wanting to try and understand the motivational roots of teenage sexual activity:
| a37g "why teenagers can’t stop themselves from having sex a lot" |
| g18g "Why us youth like to have sex as an experiment why are we always competing about sex" |
| g2b "How can we stop looking for sex" |
| h42b "Why people have sex." |
| h22g "I wanted to learn about sex how sex dissapointed people. And how people hate each other" |
| h5g "I want to know about why teenager girls sleeping around" |
Other learners took a long-term view, wanting to know about marriage and other adult relationships:
| a28b "What qualities should you look for in a woman" |
| b37 "about being a parent" |
| h16b "About have babies" |
| g22g "Wat a teenage is. Wat family is" |
| f13b "I should like to learn how can I build a good family which will be happy forever. How could I make love with one girl from the age of 18 to the marraige" |
| f16g "Being a mother. Having husband. Living together with you husband and having a house and childrens" |
| i16h "About marrige, divorse, figthing" |
In general, therefore, there was strong support among learners for pioneers to extend their counselling role beyond purely sexuality issues, several saying they want guidance about ‘life’. As one learner succinctly put it:
g29g "Now that I am all right about the sexuality education. I want the Sapler pioneer to teach us about our selves"
| Recommendation Sapler pioneers should be encouraged to gradually expand the range of lifestyle issues they deal with. |