Photo credit: Phil Moore on Flickr

Unrolls… get it? haha. Nice headline!

“Nunavut has STI rates 17 times above the national average, and the number of gonorrhea cases in the territory jumped by 200 per cent between 2006 and 2008, according to officials,” says the CBC report. (Anyone know about B.C.?)

I say kudos to health officials for doing this! I hope everyone can have a good talk about any other matters related to sex in their lives. I hope the health officials will be compassionate and non-judgmental so the young people are comfortable enough to share their concerns and questions. This could also be a window of opportunity for any young people who have been abused and need to talk with a responsible adult about their feelings.

Ideally parents would set their kids up with the right explanation and protection re: sex. People tend to figure it out for themselves, but they are well-served by at least two important caveats: avoid disease and avoid pregnancy.

Unfortunately – and understandably – many parents may not know what to say. For example, my parents, who grew up in the 1950s, were not very comfortable with the topic and believed in abstinence til married. Even though times and morals have changed, many people are still too uncomfortable to talk about it.

If kids haven’t discussed sex with their parents since a young age, they may feel too uncomfortable to bring it up. Personally, I’ve always been very open with my son’s questions, and he knows he can ask me anything. His friend even asked me a few questions, and I suggested he should ask his own mom, who had told me before she was concerned her son didn’t want to talk with her about sex.

I told the friend’s mom her son was asking me questions, and she said “I’m glad he has you to talk about it.” So, with her blessing, I answered as best as I could – questions like: “How old will I be when I have semen?” (I have to use my best guess in most cases and can double-check things on Google later if necessary.)

Most of the conversations happened in the car when we drove to and from swimming at the community centre. Some of them, on the way home, were no doubt inspired by seeing naked people. I ended up convincing my son’s friend that his mom wanted him to talk with her about it – that she wouldn’t laugh or get mad. So he brought it up, and now they are talking about it regularly. Sometimes we compare notes on the questions and have a good laugh! Got any good questions to share?

iPhone photo by Carla Bergman

Today I did a story jam with 12 young people at the Purple Thistle Centre in Vancouver.

It was a Sunday afternoon workshop at the YoungGunz program for 11 to 15-year-olds – and our “story jam” exercise got everyone focused on writing together. Each week a different mentor comes to lead workshops on photography, screen printing, music, writing, and more. Program organizer Carla Bergman – invited me to lead a workshop on writing and blogging.

In a story jam – as we did it – each person gets a piece of paper and begins a story. We write for a few minutes, then fold our paper so that only the last line of our story is visible. We pass it to the next person, who continues the story where we left off. We continue writing on each sheet and passing our papers to the next person. When the pages are full, we read them aloud. With so many authors, the stories can take some pretty outrageous twists of plot.

As soon as we started talking about blogging, one of the participants said: “I can’t think of what to write about – it’s all just random.” This made me glad I wrote a one-page set of instructions on how to start a blog – including tips for deciding what to write about. I gave out these one-pagers at the end of the session

Another said he had a blog but only wrote a few entries and then stopped updating it. Later, this same guy thanked me and said the story jam helped him get past a long bout of writer’s block. Hearing that made my day!

No one else expressed interest in starting their own blog, but the group is creating a YoungGunz blog in LiveJournal.com. The girls in the group chose to do the exercises I pulled from a Natalie Goldberg book: Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life. Apparently all the writing mentors use her exercises, but the girls wanted to do it again anyways.

The boys went outside and walked around in the rain. My nine-year-old son was delighted to go with them – these cool, funny, friendly guys a few years older. They returned soggy and laughing in time for the girls to read their writing; then they listened quietly. At the end, I encouraged everyone to stay in touch, ask questions if they have any, and keep me up to date so I can enjoy reading their blogs.

The Purple Thistle Centre is a “youth-run arts and activism centre” open in the afternoons and evenings for drop-in, with classes and lots of projects.

“We focus on young people (aged 15-30), because we feel these are the people who need to be supported in their independence the most. But we encourage participation on all levels from people aged one to one thousand.” says the Purple Thistle web site.