Into Africa

During his 2 1/2 years living in a remote African village, Andrew Dernovsek’s mud hut contained a number of things that reminded him of his home and the U.S., but it wasn’t the flag and the keepsakes alone that accomplished that.

It was the work he did on a daily basis teaching children, working on community projects and putting to work the money and gifts that came from Pueblo.

Speaking Monday to Kevin Ferguson’s geography classes at Dolores Huerta Preparatory High, he told students: “Volunteerism is one of the things that makes ours a great country. We’re one of the few cultures that goes out and tries to make things better.”

Recently returned from service with the Peace Corps, he’s hoping to continue his career next with the U.S. Foreign Service, for which he’s already passed initial exams. Ironically, that’s one federal department that doesn’t give him preference for his Peace Corps service. But if that doesn’t work out, he's been accepted to a master’s program at the University of Denver.

Son of Pueblo physicians Ken and Kim Dernovsek, he’s a 2002 Centennial High School graduate and a 2006 graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. After college, he got a taste of what was to come with the Peace Corps, working in Uganda for Universal Chastity Education, the organization his parents formed to fight HIV through abstinence programs.

He continued that work in Lesotho, a landlocked mountainous country completely surrounded by South Africa. Dernovsek explained that the Peace Corps partners with local organizations and assigned him to work with the Lesotho Catholic Bishops Conference AIDS program.

With a 40 percent unemployment rate, many Lesotho men have had to find work in South African mines, bringing home HIV infections that have spread quickly through the country.

Dernovsek said more than 30 percent of the people in the country are believed to have HIV and from 2005 to 2009, the population dropped from 2 million to 1.8 million as 70 people die a day from the effects of AIDS.

In one of the 40 villages he was responsible for visiting, he said, 230 out of 250 people were infected.

According to Dernovsek, the communities were very receptive to abstinence. “They don’t have condoms out there,” he said.

But the biggest challenge is cultural, he admitted. “The average man or woman has five or more other sex partners besides their husband or wife."

To counter that, much of the training is in “faithfulness.”

One of the biggest factors in the success of the program among young people is their own experience watching adults become ill and die.

“In the villages, you have many old people and many young people but an entire generation in between is being wiped out,” he said.

He said that he would hold community meetings in the villages on Saturdays because that was the day for funerals and he could always count on one or more taking place.

Besides giving two days a week to his HIV prevention work, he also taught English, math and science and worked on programs to help people cope with the dwindling numbers of healthy adults.

One of the things he helped develop were “keyhole” gardens, beds raised to waist-level with a notch for older people to enter and reach crops without the pain of constantly bending over.

Gardens and water tanks built with donations from Pueblo to provide cement were part of a campaign to offer more variety in foods besides their primary staple of corn.

Besides forming a youth abstinence group, Dernovsek also organized a widows’ organization to help women whose husbands had died and were left with no resources. In the local culture, he said, the dead man’s relatives could reclaim his land, possessions and livestock. The first project for the widows’ group, he said, was making popcorn.

Help from Pueblo later provided them with a solar oven to make and sell bread.