Group out to promote safe sex

NST: While young people their age spend weekends at the movies or at nightclubs, a group of 20-somethings has a more important thing on their mind — sex. And for good reason.
They are joining Family Planning Associations (FPAs) to train and advise their peers about safe and responsible sex.
While some may argue that ignorance is bliss, when it comes to sex issues, these young people feel ignorance is damning.
Twenty-year-old Loh Yat Hong trains youths to be peer educators to provide advice and counselling to other young people on sexual and reproductive health (SRH) issues. He also gives talks in schools.
"I advise them to think carefully and on precautions to take, including contraceptives," said insurance agent Loh who joined the Perak FPA four years ago and became a youth leader a year later.
He joined the FPA when he saw the mindset of his friends regarding these issues and because sex had always been regarded as a taboo subject.
In a month, he speaks to some five to 10 people, mostly young people.
James Seow Kim Ong, 22, a store owner in Malacca, joined the state FPA in 1999.
"I sympathise with many adolescents who have the wrong concept of sex. Parents don’t talk to you, and when you ask your teachers, they say ‘I don’t know’. We always get it wrong, and it turns into something else," he said.
His parents were pretty sporting about his involvement in the association, he said, saying that as long as he was doing volunteer work, they were happy as it would make him a better person.
In January, Loh and youths like him formed the Movement of Adolescents in Sex and Reproductive Health, or Movah, under the Japanese Organisation for International Co-operation in Family Planning and the United Nations Population Fund.
The eight members from Malaysia, the Philippines, Cambodia and Bangladesh, between the ages of 19 and 24, advocate SRH issues and network with other similar bodies.
Loh and Seow are part of a new generation of youth leaders health professionals wish were a bigger number.
Prof Sarinah Low Wah Yun, head of the Health Research Development Unit at the University Malaya Medical Centre, explained the need to have youth-friendly clinics that would allow young people access to information on sexual health.
Federation of Family Planning Associations head of programme services, Piaro Kaur, said clinics were making an effort to be more youth-friendly.