Secretary of State Colin Powell heard a 11-year-old speak of valuing her virginity and an HIV-positive woman advise abstinence Saturday as he met Kenyan youths who teach their peers how to avoid HIV/AIDS.

On what may be his last trip as secretary of state, Powell returned to a theme he has visited throughout his four years in office - the need to educate young people to stem a disease that destroys families, societies and economies.

“Africa, I think, for too long ... ignored the problem, looked the other way and said ‘no this isn’t happening’,” he said when asked about Africa’s high rates of infection.

“And there were cultural and tribal issues associated with this where, you know, promiscuity (was) accepted if not also encouraged and those sorts of patterns of behavior have to change in order to protect the African young people,” he said.

On a two-day visit to Kenya to witness the signing of a peace deal for southern Sudan Sunday, Powell took time to sit down with 19 youths - some as young as 11 years old - who are learning and teaching others how to fight the disease.

“We learn about HIV and AIDS ... We are also taught how to value our virginity, our education and our life,” said Grace Gathoni, 11, a Girl Guide (Scout) Brownie with a brown beret on her head and a yellow kerchief around her neck.

Alice Wambugu, a 27-year-old HIV-positive woman with close cropped hair and hoop earrings, said she counsels young women to practice “secondary virginity” - to give up sex even if they have lost their virginity - to protect themselves.

“I tell them how much they are at risk as well as give them my personal experience because it is really not smooth living with HIV,” she said. “Secondary virginity is cool.”

The youths came from a variety of private groups supported by U.S. government funding that use everything from skits to face-to-face counseling to try to prevent the spread of AIDS.

‘SUGAR DADDIES’

Boniface Mwendwa, 24, said his group promotes abstinence and condom use and seeks to stop cross-generational sex to keep youths, usually girls, from being infected by older men.

“They are being exploited by the people we are calling ‘sugar daddies’,” Mwendwa said, saying the most vulnerable group in Kenya is 9- to 16-year-old girls.

The problem is monumental. According to Kenyan officials, AIDS has killed 1.5 million people in Kenya, about two million of the roughly 30 million population are infected with HIV and more than 200,000 Kenyans die from the disease each year.

“The problem you are working on ... goes beyond just a health problem ... it’s a destroyer of societies, it’s a destroyer of economies,” Powell said.

Saying education, condom use and abstinence had helped slow infection rates elsewhere, Powell praised former South African President Nelson Mandela’s acknowledgment Thursday that his only surviving son had died from AIDS.

“That kind of personal example and willingness to share the problem publicly is important so that people will say ‘well, you know, if Mandela can talk about it, then I should talk about it and if he has it in his family, then maybe I have it in my family’,” Powell said.