Miriam Banda and the Making of a Teen Corner
- Mar 28
- 3 min read
Updated: May 6
Miriam Banda is a registered midwife at Simonga Rural Health Center, where she has been working since 2020. Her work with adolescents, however, began a few years earlier, in 2018, when she lived in Livingstone town at Nakatindi Clinic. In Zambia, each health center trains one of its healthcare professionals to specifically support adolescents, and Miriam was chosen for this opportunity.
When she came to Simonga, she took on the role of adolescent point person, meeting with young people and teaching sexual and reproductive health: puberty, menstrual hygiene, abstinence, prevention of sexually transmitted infections, safer sex, family planning, and the guiding idea the teens themselves often return to, “living a positive life.”
Over time, she grew interested not only in the topics she taught, but in the personal lifestyles and needs of the young people she worked with, as well as the quiet barriers that kept them from seeking care in the first place. Before an adolescent space, the Tonga Teen Corner, existed, young people met under a tree behind the clinic to learn about reproductive health. Only a few came. There was no privacy. Shyness, Miriam says, kept many from visiting the clinic, and teen pregnancy was very high.
Then, in a moment Miriam remembers with clarity, Tonga Teen Corners first came to Simonga, “as tourists who got interested in adolescents,” as she puts it. We made an appointment with Melody, the manager in charge, to meet the staff, and Miriam and Samuel joined her at the clinic. “By then it was just the three of us,” Miriam recalls, “Melody, Samuel and I.” As the adolescent point person, Miriam walked us through what young people were facing and what was missing.
Specifically, it was in that conversation that Miriam raised what she calls a dream: an adolescent space where they could meet with young people properly. We inquired about what such a space would require, and Miriam’s answer is central to how Tonga Teen Corners still thinks about these projects: she told us to ask the adolescents. She wanted it designed by adolescents for adolescents. Subsequently, Miriam helped us to meet both with the teens and later On Call Africa, our now local partner organization that helped organize the build. “It was a dream come true for me and the adolescents to have a space of our own,” Miriam says.
When the space was built and opened, she remembers the atmosphere as pure excitement: painting, handprints, a sense of collective making. The young people chose the motto “tuyelele antomwe (moving together),” and Miriam explains the symbols with the tenderness of someone who watched them take shape. The sunrise, she says, represented “rising from the negative lifestyle to the positive life as a team of young people in Simonga.” The values were chosen by the adolescents themselves “so as to express their inner personalities.”
In her view, the impact has been real and specific. Teen pregnancies have reduced. Young people come for counseling and to access services such as information, HIV testing and counseling, and family planning. They do not feel shy, she says, because “they have peers in the space that they can trust and rely on.” She tells the story of one teen who was influenced by friends to begin taking alcohol and drugs. He started attending counseling sessions, was helped, and then joined the group himself.
For the future, she sees practical ways to strengthen the space: more games, more information materials, and training more adolescents in sexual and reproductive health. With more trained youth and better materials, she believes the center could reach many more adolescents.
Miriam’s work began with listening to adolescents under a tree and insisting that the future space be designed by them. Together with her colleagues and adolescent volunteer leaders, she keeps the teen corner not only open, but alive: a place where “moving together” becomes more than a motto on a wall.
