တီခ်မ္း အေၾကာင္းတေစ့တေစာင္း.....

အင္း လာလာေမးၾက ေအာ္ၾကပါတယ္ စီပံုးမွာ
တီခ်မ္းဆိုတာ ဘာလဲ ေယာက်္ားလားမိန္းမလား ေဂး ဆို တာ ေပါ့စတစ္ဆိုတာတကယ္လား ဘာညာေပါ့
ကဲ အခု အားလံုးကို တျပိဳင္ထဲေျဖေပးလိုက္ျပီေနာ္
၂၀၀၆ ဂ်ဴလိုင္တံုးက တီ့ ကို လုပ္ထားတဲ့ အင္တာဗ်ဴးေလးပါ လုပ္တဲ့ အဖြဲ႕ က အေမရိကားက ေအစ့္ နဲ႔ ပတ္သက္တဲ့ သုေတသန လုပ္ေနတဲ့အဖြဲ႔တခုရဲ႕ ကြန္ျမဴနတီ (ေခၚ) လူထုအေျချပဳ ပရိုဂရမ္က လုပ္တဲ့
တီ တို႔လို အိတ္ခ်္အိုင္ဗီပိုး နဲ႔ေနထိုင္ေနတဲ့ လူငယ္ေလးေတြကို စုျပီး ေျမေတာင္ေျမာက္ေပးတဲ့ ပရိုဂရမ္ကေနဗ်ဴးတာပါ။ ေအာ္ရီဂ်င္နယ္ က ဒီမွာပါ။

အစကေတာ့ တင္ရင္ေကာင္းမလား မတင္ရင္ေကာင္းမလား စဥ္းစားေနေသးတယ္
ကိုယ္ေပါင္ကိုယ္လွန္ေထာင္းသလို ျဖစ္ေနလို႔ေလ။
ဒါေပမယ့္ တီ က ဒီလိုလူပဲဆိုတာ ျပခ်င္၊ သိေစခ်င္တာပါ
အဲလို တင္လိုက္ျခင္းအားျဖင့္ အကူအညီ လိုတဲ့ လူေတြ ေျပာျပ တိုင္ပင္ ခ်င္တဲ့ လူေတြ တီ့ ကိုဆက္သြယ္ လို႔ တေယာက္အက်ိဳးရွိရင္ လဲ ၁ ေယာက္ေပါ့ အဲလို စဥ္းစားတာပါ
မၾကိဳက္လို႔ ဖတ္ျပီးစိတ္အေနွာက္အယွက္ျဖစ္တယ္ ဆိုရင္ေတာ့ လဲ ကိုယ့္ ေဒါသနဲ႔ ကိုယ္ေပါ့ေနာ္ ခိခိ
မွတ္ခ်က္။ ။
အင္တာဗ်ဴးက ၂၀၀၆ ကပါ အဲဒါေၾကာင့္ တခ်ိဳ႕အင္ေဖာ္ေမးရွင္ေတြ က အပ္ဒိတ္မျဖစ္ေတာ့ ပါဘူး။


Voices: Taking a Stand in Myanmar


Addy Chen.

July 2006—Addy Chen is a consultant with the International HIV/AIDS Alliance Myanmar, working with men who have sex with men (MSM). In addition to volunteering among people living with HIV/AIDS, he also serves as the organization’s representative to the Asia-Pacific Network of People Living With HIV/AIDS (APN+) and is a member of TREAT Asia’s Asian Community for AIDS Treatment and Advocacy (ACATA).

When I was in my early 20s I worked as a tour guide, but after four or five years I thought it was time to change my career and so I applied to be a flight attendant for Myanmar’s local airline. I got the job and I began training to become cabin crew. But all of us who had been selected had to take a mandatory HIV test, which was performed without any pre-test counseling. After I took it, the airline managers called me in and told me that they had checked my test results twice and they showed that I was HIV positive.

So they kicked me out with the excuse that I would not be able to perform my job because it was in customer service. I was really upset. My test result was not kept confidential so everyone in the office learned about my status. At that time I did not know anything about HIV/AIDS. I didn’t know anything about my rights, either, so I didn’t know how to fight for my rights.

When I found out I was positive, I was really afraid, but I am an MSM and some of my friends knew a lot about HIV. Some were really supportive of me and helped me find a way to face the disease. At first I didn’t tell my family, but they found out when I really got sick. Eventually they accepted it and they have been supportive emotionally. So I’m kind of lucky.

Since I was diagnosed I have been very ill at times with various opportunistic infections. When I started taking antiretrovirals [ARVs] I didn’t get a CD4-count test and I didn’t receive any treatment education about drug side effects or how the drugs work, but my symptoms were very bad so I had to start ARV treatment. After a while, my health got better and I thought taking the drugs wasn’t so important any more. So I stopped taking them as regularly as I was supposed to. If I had known as much about the medications as I do now, I would have had really good adherence!

After I was diagnosed with HIV, I went back to my first job as a tour guide, and when I had been there for a while I became friends with a guy from UNOPS [the United Nations Office of Project Services]. He saw that I spoke openly about my status and that I was quite willing to work with HIV-positive people, so he asked that I come to his office and volunteer there. Then my friend said that UNOPS, along with other aid groups such as the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, CARE Myanmar, and the UN Development Program, wanted to establish a network in Myanmar to support people living with HIV/AIDS [PLWA], and I became involved with this group.

The Myanmar country representative for the International HIV Alliance also approached me and I started working with them as an MSM prevention consultant. Now we have the network for PLWA established and we’re starting to build our capacity to understand how anti-HIV drugs work, what is happening in the region, and how we can get access to treatment.