I Wanted to Experience Marriage and Sex – Josephine

Lack of Adolescent sexual reproductive health education made Josephine Mutale think that she can have sex with her boyfriend because she started experiencing sexual feelings. According to Mutale no one talked to her about the sexual feelings and yet she had the urge for it and wanted to experiment it.

Josephine was born on 5th march 2003 in Mukanga village the third born in a family of five.

She had no idea of what it meant to be an adolescent, what Sex and marriage were all about and she was very anxious to start engaging in sexual activities and get married.

Josephine is now 20 years old.

“I was only a 15-year-old girl when I started engaging in sex and decided to get married out of my own will and excitement”. To tell the truth I became rebellious because I had these feelings.”

Josephine recalls that instead of her mother talking to her openly about those feelings so that she can understand what it meant to be an adolescent the mother used anger and resentment towards her, and this made her to become more rebellious.

“My mother was angry and never really talked to me, as for me I was in love and was excited because I was so much in love with the same guy, and I wanted to experience sex and even marry him’’ said Josephine.

“I did not listen to anyone, I was not scared of anyone, because I just wanted to be with the same guy.” She narrates.

She wrote grade seven in 2018 and after passing to go to grade eight and got 630 points she decided to defy everyone in the community and decided to do what she wanted.

Josephine eloped and went to live with the man of her life and few months later problems began. What she wanted to experience was harsh and realized why her mother was against it.

Josephine went back to school in 2020 and has since completed school.

“I realized that sex was just a feeling, and you don’t have to do it and I wish my mother or the people from NGOCC that are assisting me now talked to me earlier about it”.

Josephine, however, is grateful that her mother and a group of committee members immediately supported her and referred her to a Health Center where she started receiving some counseling services and was given information about her sexuality.

She says, “The people from NGOCC assisted me by talking to me after my mother reported to them that I had done and what I was going through.”

“With my mother’s love, I realized that I had made a big mistake, and my mother has taken me back to school. I have left the man I thought I loved more than anything in the world.”

Now that Josephine has completed school, she advises other children to always listen to their parents and guardians and seek information at the Youth Friendly Center at a Health Facility so that they do not do what she had done.

Interventions by NGOCC were supported by the IM Swedish