I am Yeva, 20 years old.
I study at Yerevan State University,
in the faculty of English language and literature.
Education has always been important to me.
During my school years I enjoyed not only the classes,
but also the extracurricular activities.
I liked all the subjects, except for Math.
There were subjects I didn’t give much importance to,
because the classes were really dull.
One of them was Social Science.
Both the book and the class were so boring
and we never cared about the importance of knowing
one’s rights and responsibilities as a pupil and as a citizen.
This is what happened during biology classes, too.
Biology was interesting in general,
but there was a session during the course that was the most awkward one
I had to attend during my school life: the class of reproductive health.
We were at 9th grade,
when we had our first lesson of the reproductive health session.
The atmosphere was very tense.
We spoke a bit about our physiology
and quickly moved to menstruation and nocturnal emission,
though we didn’t talk much about the latter.
The teacher mentioned that menstruation first occurs with the girls
who have a bit bigger bodies.
On that day I was sitting at the last desk
and I promise I will never forget the looks I got from my classmates
as if I was the only girl in the world to experience menstruation cycle ever.
A few days later, when we hardly recovered from the shock,
the boys and girls in our class were organized into separate groups:
boys were taken to the physical education teacher,
while girls were sent to the nurse room.
And she immediately started telling about child delivery.
I still remember the fear we all had because she was talking about the process
as if it is a scene from a horror movie.
Up to this day I have a fear of having a baby,
just because of the way she was telling us about the delivery.
People may wonder why a young lady like me would talk about this?
But I was the one, who was ashamed and I was the one,
who taught not to be ashamed of this.
I was lucky to be in a project called Y-Peer
organized by World Vision Armenia and the United Nations in Armenia.
The project was about sexual and reproductive health.
So, they trained us to be trainers and taught us the whole course.
After a while, we started conducting training sessions at schools
and teaching all we knew.
It took a week to see that the project succeeded
and there were pupils, who weren't ashamed
to learn about their bodies and talk about it.
There are a number of important facts about this topic.
One of them is that in July 2008,
Healthy Lifestyle was added to the subjects that are taught at school.
But the law said the school principal was in charge of choosing
to teach the subject at school or not.
And in January 2011 the subject was already a mandatory one for all schools,
there was a separate part of the course called Sexual and Reproductive Health.
The important point is that it was supposed to be taught
before the children hit the puberty,
but when it was not taught properly Armenians could find the solution:
in girls’ cases it’s called
“She’ll get to know about it when she gets married”,
while in boys’ cases it sounds like
“He is a boy, he knows everything about it”.
In Armenia, it is always said that the youth is our future.
But what if our future is not going to be healthy
just because they are not aware of their body?
That is why, these training courses are very important
and they let you study your physiology and know yourself thoroughly.
This is not only for future mothers,
this is for the physical and mental health of every single one of us.
The stereotypes that sound like “A princess does not use the toilet”
is quite the same when Armenian parents think that their children
aren't interested and don't need to know about sexual and reproductive health.
But obviously, both of the stereotypes are wrong.
The fact is that the subject is still not fully integrated
into our educational system.
The first factor is that even the teacher is ashamed to talk about the subject
and so are the pupils.
Another factor affecting it is that
the physical education teacher and the school nurse
are not much aware of the topic
and they share either their own experience or something they’ve seen in the movies.
In fact, this is a huge issue and it can’t be solved overnight,
so we need to start with ourselves.
As teenagers we need to feel free to talk and to listen about this,
and the teachers and parents should feel free to teach us sharing their experience.
Eventually, this will lead to being educated,
and being educated is never a thing to be ashamed of.
As an Armenian saying goes
“If it is natural then it is appropriate”.