Gaysia (33 page)

The organisation, which I'll call Assist, provided education on HIV and home-based care for those already infected. Assist's head, whom I'll call Lo-Lo, was so scared of retribution that he refused to let me visit their headquarters.

‘Benjamin, it is impossible for us to bring you to our office due to those sensitivities,' he said on the phone. ‘Because to host a foreigner like you, we have to report a full itinerary. We would risk shutting down our CBO [community-based organisation], because of this regional official – that's one reason. The bullshit regulations are another. That's why, instead of visiting us, we will visit
you
. For us to deny you to come to our office is, for us,
quite tragic
.'

We met in the lobby of my Mandalay hostel. They were quite a sight: plump Lo-Lo and his four Assist colleagues, all MSMs, some in loud outfits and one wearing sunglasses indoors. Some of them were HIV-positive, Lo-Lo explained. When I delicately asked who in particular was, Lo-Lo laughed.

‘He and he is HIV-positive,' he said, pointing at two of the men. ‘But these two,' he added, pointing to the other two, ‘are
very
potential.'

Everyone laughed. Maybe I'd been in Myanmar for too long, but I laughed as well.

The regional official in charge of CBO and NGO registration in Mandalay was a man in his fifties, with a wife and children. Lo-Lo said the officer was embezzling funds from Assist,
an organisation he was supposed to be supervising. He would arrange meetings with Assist's staff out of work hours at restaurants and bars, demanding things like cameras and mobile phones be bought with Assist's money. He knew Assist received decent funding from international HIV and health organisations and now saw it as a money pit. Sometimes at the meetings, he would even quietly – but firmly – demand to sleep with some of Assist's male staff members, or the male staff members' husbands.

‘What?' I said.

‘It's actually not so difficult for us!' Lo-Lo said, laughing.

‘So you've become a dating agency,' I said. ‘Or pimps.'

‘No, we have to refuse him,' Lo-Lo said. ‘“Sir, this time, we cannot arrange for you.” But because we said no, we're not close to him now.'

‘But he's the gatekeeper to ensure you remain a government-approved CBO.'

‘We
are
a government-approved CBO,' Lo-Lo said.

But Lo-Lo added that word had now come from the official that Assist was not to receive funding. When we spoke, Lo-Lo had been forced to go behind his back and speak to the funding bodies directly, explaining the situation. It was a huge risk. If anything went wrong, the operation would be shut down. Assist's ongoing survival was a tightrope act without a safety net.

Later, another NGO worker diplomatically assessed the situation between his NGO and the government. ‘Let's just say we're doing okay,
despite
the government,' he said.

Things were getting better. Every NGO worker I spoke to agreed on that. Access to ARTs would get easier and, with the international financing institution Global Fund's support, Myanmar's ART distribution was set to at least double, with targeted
projections at 45,000 HIV-positive people on ARTs by 2015.

‘It's still not enough,' Markus from UNAIDS said, ‘but it's a substantial improvement from now.'

Sex education was getting better too. In the past decade, the number of NGOs that specifically focused on HIV had blossomed. When Markus arrived in Myanmar six years earlier, hardly any of this infrastructure existed.

‘NGOs are doing it and they can actually do it quicker and better than government,' Markus said. Still, he added, the Burmese government was far better placed as the country's long-term provider and administrator. For now, though, he saw NGOs working far more intimately with the government's department of health and the national AIDS program.

‘New infections are very low,' he said. ‘Don't underestimate Myanmar. I'm always surprised. Despite the isolation, I think they're very good at acquiring knowledge with very limited resources.'

It was a relief. Because if nothing about the current situation changed, four out of five HIV-positive people would die waiting for medication.

On one of my final mornings in Yangon, I took a taxi to the outskirts of the city, forty minutes from downtown. Accompanying me was Thiha Kyaing, a short, affable, good-looking Burmese guy in his forties who had started a national NGO called Phoenix, which was on the cusp of being formally registered with the government. Thiha Kyaing had offered to act as an interpreter for some
apwint
sex workers who were willing to talk to me. All were HIV-positive and at different stages of
treatment.

One of them was Myat Noe, who was twenty years old and wore her hair long, dyed acrylic orange, crimped like a teenage girl at a slumber party and kept together with Mickey Mouse clips. The dress she wore was barely-there short in a tropical flowery print. Despite her tiny frame, she had huge lips, a husky voice and a confident swagger. She had no idea what HIV was until she tested positive.

Myat Noe had grown up in a village called Myeik. Her father was a fisherman and her mother a full-time homemaker. There were six boys and two girls in the family, and she'd been raised as the youngest boy, but always knew she was different from her brothers. Myat Noe insisted on dressing as a girl, to the disapproval of her family. No one else she'd met in Myeik was remotely like her – born as a boy but felt like a girl – and she couldn't remember having a single friend in her childhood.

When Myat Noe was ten years old, a ‘businesswoman' – other wise known as a human trafficker – came to Myeik on a scouting mission, looking for a young girl to work as her maid in Yangon. When she found Myat Noe on the street, this woman explained there were other people just like Myat Noe in Yangon, a city of endless opportunity. Myat Noe looked at her rundown village, got on the bus with the woman and never looked back.

In Yangon, Myat Noe lived with the trafficker. She was given a bed, food and clothes, but no money. Roaming around Yangon in her spare time, she began to encounter other
apwint
in the tea houses who danced at
nat
spirit festivals, where
apwint
were revered as spirit mediums in dance ceremonies that predated Buddhism.

Myat Noe left the trafficker and started living with the other
apwint
, and people would come to the
nat
dances just to see Myat Noe's beauty, even though she wasn't dancing. The other
apwint
encouraged Myat Noe to start doing
offer
, a local slang word for prostitution. She was fifteen years old, scared and a virgin, but began working the pedestrian overpass outside Lion World. It didn't take long before the customers came to her. For the first few times, getting fucked from behind – often roughly – meant pain and bleeding, but she soon got the hang of it and was charging 3000 kyats an hour. Selling herself was worth more back then. She never used condoms. She'd never even heard of them.

Two years later, she was diagnosed as HIV-positive. She got her diagnosis at PSI's Top Centre after some peer educators referred her onwards.

‘They explained very well,' Myat Noe said. ‘They even explained that it wasn't something to be scared about and how I could live with treatment, so then I became very relaxed.'

They showed Myat Noe how to use condoms and it was the first time she'd ever seen the rubbery things.

‘When you went back to work with condoms,' I said, ‘what happened with the clients?'

‘Some refused,' she said. ‘They don't want to use them.'

‘Did you have sex with them anyway?'

‘I told them I'm HIV-positive. See, there are two kinds of clients. One: before I start working, they'll ask for condom. Two: they don't know what a condom is. They've never seen it before. So sometimes they say, “I'll give you more money to fuck you without the condom.”'

‘And what do you say?'

Myat Noe raised an eyebrow, then fluttered her lashes at me.

‘They give me more, I let it be.'

Even though Myat Noe had been diagnosed at PSI, she hadn't gone back. She knew she should regularly monitor her CD4 levels, but something was stopping her from returning.

‘Why haven't you been monitoring your CD4 count?' I asked.

‘I don't want to monitor it,' she said simply.

‘What are you scared of?'

She looked away. ‘I'm scared to take drugs.'

‘Why are you scared of taking drugs?' I asked.

‘Because of the side effects! Some of my friends had a changed appearance because of the drugs!'

It was true: before I spoke to Myat Noe, I'd spoken to several other sex workers who had been on ARTs for years. They were grateful that their lives had been saved by the drugs, but hated how the medication aged them, making their cheekbones more prominent. I could barely conceal my surprise when one
apwint
sex worker told me she was thirty years old. Work and medication had aged her terribly and she looked far older than my own mother, who was in her late fifties.

‘What are you more scared of?' I asked Myat Noe. ‘Getting sick from HIV or the side effects of drugs?'

‘I don't want to change my appearance,' she said firmly.

‘What will you do if you get sick?'

She blew air softly with her mouth, pouting the way kids do when they're bored.

‘Then I will go onto ARTs,' she said.

I asked how confident she was that she'd be able to access ARTs if she needed them. She looked at me searchingly, a trace of worry on her face, as though wondering whether I knew something she didn't. The horrible thing was, maybe I did.

‘I'm not ready for ARTs just yet,' she said.

‘Do you know where to get them when you need them?'

‘Some people talk about some place, but I've never been there,' Myat Noe said. ‘To be honest, I don't know. My only worry about when I'm on ARTs is that I need caregivers. Because there is no one around me.'

Eventually, we changed the subject and talked about other stuff that didn't matter. She asked me about Australia – what it was like, where it was in the world – and how it was that I was travelling by myself. Casually, she asked me where I was staying in Yangon, and as I began to reply, Thiha Kyaing – who had been acting as our translator – started chuckling. Myat Noe only asked me this because she was wondering whether I'd like to have sex with her. When I started laughing too, Myat Noe posed faux-seductively for me on her chair.

I ended our conversation the way I end all my interviews: I asked Myat Noe whether there was anything she wanted to add, or if she had any questions herself. She thought about it, then spoke slowly and carefully in Burmese to Thiha Kyaing, who relayed her question back to me with a curious, dry look.

‘She would like to know,' Thiha Kyaing said, ‘how
you
can help
her
.'

I hadn't expected that.

I started reeling off the names of some NGOs, but had trouble explaining where to find them. There were some places, I said, that might be able to help, like MSF's
Thazin
clinics, and another one called
Médecins du Monde
, and there was also PSI … but you know of them already, and there's Phoenix, of course, and others, but I don't know their addresses off the top of my head –

I was rambling.

I didn't know how to answer her question. I didn't know what response she was looking for. In Myanmar, no one knew what the future would bring. ‘What can you do to help me?' she had asked. And, to my shame, I couldn't quite bring myself to look her in the eye.

INDIA

In which we visit the latest country in the world to have decriminalised homosexuality, travel thirty hours in a train and march in a pride parade involving a lesbian group with a staggering acronym. Key quote that was not used in this story, but is pivotal nonetheless: ‘Look at how we've been treated, the most harmless of minorities' – Ashok Row Kavi. Intensity of food poisoning while researching this story (on a scale of one to ten): eight.