Condoms, Pills and Professional Identity
Ethnographic research with different Catholic HIV/AIDS projects in Uganda revealed a remarkable contrast between HIV prevention and HIV counselling with regard to the condom question. Whereas HIV prevention facilitators usually followed the official Catholic policy and discouraged condom use, HIV counsellors most often encouraged their clients to use condoms. Taking this contrast as a starting point, this chapter analyses the position and practices of HIV counsellors in Catholic HIV/AIDS projects in Uganda. It focuses on the way counsellors negotiate and transform counselling techniques and notions of appropriate sexuality in the context of ARV treatment, and how these negotiations are connected to both transnational dynamics and local moral discourses. The chapter illustrates how the local professional identity of HIV counsellors and the transnational relations of the ART scale-up project appear to structure the counsellors’ approach to condom use much more than the official policy of the Catholic Church.