Here are two abstracts and one paper on language and action on HIV in Myanmar.
Is English being used as an elitist tool for exclusion or does it give people space to talk about issues that they have not previously discussed? Or both, or neither?
Comments welcome.
[him] moderator
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Linguistic and cultural barriers to raising awareness about MSM among NGO staff in Myanmar
Aung Min THEIN
Burnet Institute Myanmar, Myanmar
Issues : Local NGO staff in Myanmar show high levels of stigma and shame about sexuality and MSM despite efforts to raise their awareness. Project : 29 experienced field workers from 13 local and International NGOs and CBOs that provide services for MSM in Myanmar participated in a short course on sexuality and gender.
Results : Facilitators encountered very significant linguistic and cultural obstacles to increasing awareness. First, it was very difficult to find Myanmar equivalents for many gender and sexual terms, including “MSM,” “gender,” “homosexual,” “bisexual,” “transgender,” and others. MSM on the street have developed a large number of slang terms that vary greatly from place to place. Second, even among these participants (NGO workers), there were clear and high levels of stigma regarding MSM and intense shame regarding sexuality in general.
Lesson Learned: Organizations need to develop and use simple, local terms that facilitate discussions of sexuality and gender among groups and in the community. Organizations serving this population also need to coordinate to use a unified lexicon of terms, rather than working in isolation. Furthermore, although many organizations in Myanmar recognize the existence of stigma on paper, this issue is still not being appropriately addressed among their own staff, let alone in the field.
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TuPA052 Those who ‘Talk the Talk’ of HIV Prevention in Myanmar Do Not Always ‘Walk the Walk’
Gillian Fletcher
La Trobe University, Australia
Issues : In Myanmar, pedagogic approaches to good HIV prevention practice are usually taught and referred to in English. The words are deployed by senior staff and field workers alike and use of these terms is often considered synonymous with implementation of the pedagogic practice referred to by these terms.
Project : This abstract reports on doctoral research undertaken in Myanmar. Individual indepth interviews were carried out with a total of 34 individuals: community members and INGO field workers (including MSM and sex workers), and senior national staff from multiple INGOs. Results : When describing their practice, field workers scattered English-language HIV-speak terms throughout Burmese sentences. MSM and sex workers who had had repeated exposure to INGOs also adopted fragments of this HIV-speak. Yet evidence showed the HIV prevention education practice relied on top-down transmission of technical, external (English language) knowledge. The words were being used but their intended practical meaning was lost.
Lesson Learned: Usage of English terms that define pedagogic practice based in communication and two-way sharing of knowledge is not the same thing as
implementing the pedagogic practice itself. Such usage of terms can in fact mask the reality of field-based practice that focuses on ‘technical’ terms and subjugates community understandings and experience.
