Kendall pursues her cause in Africa

Friday, October 03, 2008 -

 Kendall (back, right) during earlier visit to Malawi
 

With an earnest expression rare for someone so young, 3-month-old Gabriel appears ready to join his mother, Nancy Kendall, for a year-long year stay in Mozambique, a country in southeast Africa significantly affected by HIV/AIDS.

Kendall, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at UW-Madison, also plans to travel to neighboring Malawi to conduct comparative research.

She and husband Tomas Uribe, a native of Colombia, have taken precautions to ensure Gabriel’s safety and health, including living in a city with a low incidence of malaria, but they’re still a little nervous.

“He’s gonna melt, but he won’t get malaria,” Kendall says with assurance, during an interview prior to her departure this summer.

Why would the new mother take any chance at all? Because she feels a powerful responsibility to help improve life for Mozambican and Malawian schoolchildren affected by HIV/AIDS.

In both countries, about 15 percent of the population is infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The majority of those infected are female, ages 13-24 and urban dwellers, although the ratio of urban and rural cases is beginning to reverse in Malawi.

Children affected by AIDS – whether infected themselves or because a family member who is ill – face many struggles that influence their experiences in school, Kendall says.

Researchers have anecdotes about how these children respond to the social and academic pressures and expectations of school life, but little systematic research exists on those aspects of their lives.

“They come to school and may be bullied, made fun of, or abused… and (the bullies) can get away with it, because the children don’t have support or protection from adults,” she says.

Also, some children come to school unwashed or malnourished because their care depends on older siblings, who are ill-prepared but forced to become caretakers, Kendall says.  In AIDS-afflicted areas, the task of caring for ill parents or relatives often falls on children — responsibilities that compel many to drop out of school.

On a previous visit to Malawi, she talked to children who assumed they were sick because they had repeated exposure to a relative’s blood or vomit, or exhibited other symptoms.

Kendall wants to investigate how children affected by HIV/AIDS interact with peers and adults in schools.

She also plans to study the HIV/AIDS curriculum — particularly U.S.-funded sexuality education, which emphasizes abstinence-only before marriage — to see what children are taught and how they respond.

Some studies have shown that the curriculum has little or no impact. Kendall wonders whether this is due, in part, to the curriculum’s failure to address the children’s daily experiences with HIV and AIDS.

Other issues she wants to address include:

• Do schools teach children how to take care of family members with AIDS?
• Does abstinence-only instruction address the fact that more than 70 percent of girls report that their first sexual experience was forced?
• What kinds of information do older children receive about sex and sexuality at school and in their communities?  How do they process that information? Do they connect it to their day-to-day lives?

She hopes to use what she learns to inform international responses to the AIDS crisis in Africa and offer evidence for improving educational policies there.

Roots of involvement

Kendall’s interest in Africa stems from her college days, when she worked for non-governmental agencies in Washington, D.C.

After graduation, one of those NGOs hired her to document and evaluate GABLE (Girls Attainment in Basic Literacy and Education Project), a project in Malawi funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) .

The experience gave Kendall the cause that would direct her personal and professional life from then on.

“That was it… I was totally hooked,” says Kendall, who inherited her personal philosophy of public service from her parents.

Until the fourth grade, she lived in Honduras and Guatemala, where her parents worked in international public heath, child development and infant nutrition.

“My sisters and I grew up feeling that the way to make our lives meaningful was to make a life where you work in service to others,” she says. “We were also raised very consciously by my parents to think about the relative privilege in which we live.”

Her particular privilege included having connections to organizations, governments and institutions trying to make a difference for people in poor countries.

“We have a responsibility to make sure things are being done as best as they can be — and to change what’s not working,” she says.

After her NGO job in Malawi, Kendall enrolled at Stanford University for doctoral work in international and comparative education.

Her dissertation focused on the effects of the international “Education for All” movement in Malawi. She analyzed how the fallout of political democratization and economic liberalization in the education system affected schoolchildren and communities.

As a faculty member at UW-Madison, Kendall has continued her research on international education development efforts, with a new focus on children affected by one of Africa’s deadliest diseases.

But while Kendall believes in the importance of helping children who are struggling to get an education, she is skeptical about the long-term value of efforts to support and encourage these children to stay in school: “What does that mean for the 98 percent of kids who go through school under the false promise of a better life once they get through with it?”

She has built long-term connections and friendships in Malawi and nearby countries, “but I’m not African — it’s not for me to tell countries’ governments what to do,” she says.

Instead, she hopes to press her own government and other international groups to revise their international policies.

“International development organizations need to think more carefully about the unintended consequences of their work, the relationships and programs they are fostering, and how they can improve,” she says.

Kendall also hopes to build support for organizations and individuals working to improve the lives of children affected by AIDS.

“Because of the type of research I do, I am able to identify NGOs that are doing very good work at the individual, family, and community level, as well as leaders and schools that are working to keep these kids healthy, cared for, and involved in school,” she says.

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