Zimbabwean stories of "Best Practice" - SAfAIDS

the meetings by politely requesting everyone, including the chief, to literally take off their jackets as anindication that everybody was de-rolling to allow free discussion. During the discussion, there was nohusband, no chief, no mother or father-in-law; in short there were simply no roles at that platform. Theimpact of this simple gesture was amazing, especially for the women. At the end of the meeting, Pennyagain asked people to put their jackets on to re-assume their respective roles.Figure 5: Leading a focus group discussionRound 1 of culture dialogues - "Blaming Game and harsh realities"The first round of dialogues was about breaking the silence. The participants were requested to identifyharmful cultural practices in their community and to discuss how these are linked to HIV. Despite theseparation of the sexes, the implementers found that many of the women were still reluctant to share theirproblems with a bigger group in a community where everyone either knew the other person or was relatedto someone. Thus the project instituted a 'ballot box' to allow women to share their concerns andsuggestions anonymously. According to one woman,"As simple as it looked, the idea of the ballot box turned out to be one of the most importantinnovations of the project as it truly allowed the voices of the women to be heard. There wasno way we could express everything with our mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law present."At the end of the first dialogue, it was observed that the ballot box from the men was empty while the onefrom the women was full of hand-written letters. This confirmed the theory that men feel free to share withother men about almost any issue. On the other hand, the women had written letters and notes about thepainful stories of their lives as subordinate and inferior members of the community and about the abusesthey were experiencing within the frame of some highly secretive traditional practices that were going onin the community. An example was the story of a woman who was in a dilemma because her husband, whohad left her and stayed away for eight years, had come back. The husband, insisting that the marriage was20