It’s usually a girl who is a little bit quiet, smart, but not brilliant, pleasant.  She is often from a far-flung municipality and the first in her family to go to college.  During her first semester she is intensely homesick and misses her family and her high school friends terribly as she grapples with cooking for herself, washing her own clothes, studying new and difficult things, and making new friends.

By second year she settles down.  By the end of the year she has a boyfriend.  By her third year she’s pregnant, and soon after the baby is born, she quits school.

This is not an isolated incident. I have witnessed it many times during the past ten years here in Palawan; the question is, “Why does this happen?”

Partly this occurs because students lack basic information about sex and how to prevent pregnancy. To help counter this, we have been doing Reproductive Health Education seminars with some of the classes in Palawan State University.  In Ami’s first few months here, she and Lyn did a three part, nine-hour workshop with my second year class from the College of Teacher Education.  In the last month, the team – this time Ami, Lyn, and our nurse Josh – conducted two three-hour workshops with second year students from the School of Social Work and Nursing.  For the most part students were quite interested in these classes and asked some pretty basic health questions:  i.e. How can we stop getting so many UTI’s?  How can we prevent cramps during our periods? How can we deal with all this tension and stress?

The seminars have shown that many of the students have wrong information and a lot of misunderstandings about Reproductive Health. However, despite a lot of the misinformation they’ve picked up about the basics of preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, they do seem to understand that sex can lead to pregnancy. So why are there so many unplanned pregnancies among these students?

As a teacher I am inclined to attribute some of this to underdeveloped critical thinking skills.  Students rarely plan ahead or look ahead in terms of the consequences of their actions.  If I go out tonight, will I still have time to finish my paper by tomorrow?  If I engage in unprotected sex, might I get pregnant?  If I get pregnant, how will I manage to finish school?  I also think that because of the strong cultural overlay which demands lip service to fairly puritanical moral values, students will not really admit to themselves that what they are getting into is in fact, a sexual relationship.  Six months down the line they will be writing essays for me that say “And then something happened.”   Sex and pregnancy seem to come as a total surprise, unpredictable and unpreventable.  They just happen.

Our guest researcher, Margeaux Berroth, has not yet finalized her work assessing student health and health needs, but she did draw some interesting tentative conclusions even while she was still here in Puerto Princesa.  It seemed clear to her that generally, students did not feel empowered to control their own futures or determined to make the most of those futures. They seemed to feel that life would just happen and they would not get very much further from where they started out.  However, students in challenging programs such as Petroleum Engineering, or those in student leadership positions, did feel more in control of their lives and did not report so many unplanned pregnancies or boarding house abortions.

What does this mean for us?  I am convinced that Margeaux’s findings show that these students are in definite need of Reproductive Health education, as well as education on critical thinking and empowerment.  The students at PSU actually ARE privileged and empowered people – they are college students – and the sky should be the limit.  We can help them grow to the point of recognizing that, and building on it.  We can encourage both boys and girls to form the sort of respectful and responsible relationships that will serve them well in the future.

The current groupthink is hard to oppose, so we simply have to try to modify it. Since the current culture of our students is one of casual sex, unplanned sex, unprotected sex, we have to work on changing behavior – or at least attitudes – within groups, one group at a time.   I think of each class as a community – I know the students support each other unfailingly.  So we have to work on that level.

Of course to accomplish this, we have to find ways of interacting with students more intensively than what is possible in a three-hour time slot, but I am confident that the longer we work within the university, the more effect we will have.  We recognize that the needs are great in the many high schools and colleges in the city. We are working to expand our programming to try to reach as many young people as possible. We hope that with increased resources, we will be able to move into more schools to help equip Palawan’s future leaders with the information they need to make responsible decisions.

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