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Hazel Marimbiza
LORETA Nkiwane* is a young woman with big dreams. The 16-year-old pupil at one of Bulawayo’s secondary schools plans to study hard so she can go to university and later become a meteorologist.
In the meantime, she explained that there are many barriers for girls her age to reach their goals.
“Young people especially girls face a lot of peer pressure. There are problems with drugs but one of the greatest pressures is having sexual intercourse with different partners,” said Nkiwane.
“There are so many things which affect us and we end up resorting to having sex thinking we can solve our problems in that way. We have low self-esteem, lack of purpose and sometimes we are not economically empowered. So all those things leave voids in us which we tend to fill with relationships. When you are in a relationship for example you will feel loved and appreciated and so at the end of the day we give in to sex because we feel we owe our partners a lot,” added Nkiwane.
However, like many high school pupils what Nkiwane did not know is that having many sexual partners especially as a teenager puts her at a high risk of contracting cervical cancer.
“I had no idea that there was something called cervical cancer and that it can be contracted by having many sexual partners. It’s one of those things that shocked me after hearing about it because then I thought of all the things I had done and I secretly wondered if by any chance I had contracted cervical cancer,” said Nkiwane.
Just like in any other country Zimbabwean women face the threat of cervical cancer. The disease also poses a threat to the futures of young women like Loreta. Globally, cervical cancer is the fourth most frequent cancer in women. While the disease is the fourth most frequent cancer in women in the world, it is even more so in Zimbabwe. However, cervical cancer screening is limited, most women do not know about it, especially teenagers in high schools.
That is why a recently opened local organisation called Generational Changes Girls is focusing on prevention of cervical cancer by taking time to educate girls in various high schools on the dangers of having many sexual partners which can potentially lead to them contracting cervical cancer.
Speaking to B-Metro, Generational Changes Girls’ founder Brenda Madondo said as a health practitioner who had dealt with so many cancer patients she saw it fit to open an organisation which would help deal with the spread of cervical cancer.
“Teaching girls at high school about the dangers associated with having many sexual partners could see us as a nation having a cervical cancer-free generation. Before cervical cancer is called cancer the body develops pre-cancerous cells. At the pre-cancerous level a woman has between five-20 years to get treatment and those cells can be completely cleared. However, most women come to us for treatment when the pre-cancerous cells have developed into cancer and it becomes hard for them to be treated. So we want young girls to be aware of all this so that they can continually come for screening because we are
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