by Benjamin Law
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 w
ay 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.
IN THE MIDDLE OF a six-hour taxi ride from Delhi, I paused at an outdoor cement urinal that smelled – weirdly – of human shit, wondering whether I’d made a terrible mistake. According to my estimates, we were in the middle of nowhere and it made me anxious. ‘Middle of nowhere’ wasn’t an exact coordinate, but when you’re in India on your own, relying on a driver who doesn’t speak English and becoming paranoid that neither of you knows where you are, it’s difficult to be precise. Plus the cold was fuddling my brain. The chill had an almost liquid quality, the way it seeped through my beanie, gloves, multi-layered thermals, down my jeans and into my shoes. No one had told me the subcontinent could feel so Arctic.
Our destination was near Haridwar, one of India’s holy cities and a well-known site of pilgrimage. On the map, though, our target was a tiny cluster on the side of the road, a cameo appearance from humanity: it would be all too easy to miss.
I zipped up and scurried into the cab’s backseat. The driver shook his head and reclined the passenger seat to show me I could lie completely flat.
‘Sleep,’ he said, pointing. ‘You sleep.’
It was 1.30 am. I liked the way he thought.
As I slipped into unconsciousness, the driver turned up the heat to block out the cold that was entering through every crack. Outside, the temperature continued to plummet, breaking Indian meteorological records. Across the country, thick wafts of movie-set fog were causing epic train delays, forcing stranded passengers to sleep on station floors with blankets pulled over their faces, and giving platforms the look of giant makeshift morgues after a natural disaster. That night, people died from exposure to the cold in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.
The driver woke me up three hours later. We had arrived at Patanjali Yogpeeth, also known as Patanjali University. It wasn’t really a university, but rather a strange hybrid of health research institute, conference centre and massive yoga retreat. I shouldn’t have worried about missing it: the entrance for the guests’ quarters was huge, a white concrete frame recalling the entrance to a Hollywood studio, set off by warm glowing lights. Juvenile palm trees sprouted alongside manicured pathways, bordering tidy flowerbeds of gerberas and chrysanthemums.
Staff dressed in military gear asked me for my papers, then walked me to my room, protecting themselves from the cold by pulling heavy blankets over their shoulders and scarves around their faces like improvised balaclavas.
My bathroom was a slab of cement with a basin and faucets. The showerhead didn’t work, so I bathed the way most people in India did: by filling a large bucket with as much hot water as possible and then scrubbing myself raw while crouching on the freezing concrete. In bed, I cocooned myself in blankets. I couldn’t doze for long: my glow-in-the-dark watch told me I’d have to be awake soon. In less than two hours, I’d have my first chance to see the guru I’d come to meet. One of the most powerful and influential men in India, he had gathered millions of disciples and devotees worldwide, attracted by his claims about the curative power of yoga and ayurvedic medicine. It was believed that his practices could cure cancer and reverse diabetes, but his most controversial claim was that he could cure people of homosexuality. Of course, I had heard this before, but Ramdev was different. In India, he was a household name.
Swamiji Baba Ramdev was known by many names: Baba Ramdev, Swami Ramdev, Yogarishi Swami Ramdevji or, simply, Babaji. If you showed his photo to any Indian on the street, they would recognise him immediately. His picture was plastered outside traditional ayurvedic pharmacies throughout the country: long, slick black hair, bushy beard and squeezable, always-smiling face. In his youth, he had resembled an Indian version of the apple-cheeked American actor Mark Ruffalo. No one knew Ramdev’s real age, but most people believed he was in his late forties or early fifties.
Ramdev led the simple life of an ascetic – steamed vegetables; strict sexual abstinence; same old orange robes day in, day out – and reportedly didn’t even have a bank account in his own name, but he was ridiculously rich. His empire of yoga camps, ayurvedic drugs, fruit juices and natural toiletries was estimated to be worth 25 million US dollars. India Today declared him to be the twenty-ninth most powerful person in the country. To his 80 million followers worldwide, and 20 million regular television viewers who followed his morning exercises, Ramdev was not a mere yoga instructor but a holy leader and cult hero. No matter whether they were Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Christian, Ramdev said everyone could benefit from his teachings.
In mid 2009, there had been a huge nationwide campaign to repeal Section 377, a colonial hangover that effectively outlawed homosexual sex in India. Ramdev used this moment to become a prominent anti-gay campaigner, insisting that homosexuality was a sexual abnormality, which he could cure.
‘The verdict will encourage criminality and a sick mentality,’ he said in a press statement. ‘This kind of thing is shameful and insulting. We are blindly following the West in everything. This is breaking the family system in India. Homosexuals are sick people. They should be sent to hospitals for treatment.’
At Patanjali, my alarm went off. I hadn’t really slept. It was still dark outside. I could hear my fellow yogis opening their doors, switching on lights and shuffling their feet. Outside, loudspeakers stirred us from our rooms.
‘The yoga sessi
on will start at 5.45 precisely,’ they announced in English. ‘The yoga session will start at 5.45 precisely.’
We slowly filed outside, crossing our arms close against our bodies and watching the steam of our breath as we joined the human river headed for the amphitheatre. Most of the people were Indian, but a number of the delegates had flown here. Some had East Asian backgrounds, but a decent number were white people from America, Europe and Australia, hippies who had hit retirement and were looking for enlightenment. Everyone was dressed bizarrely. The freezing weather demanded multiple layers of clothing, but we were also heading to a yoga class that required breezy, flexible apparel. People wore loose tracksuit pants and fur stoles; polyester jackets and Thai fisherman pants, over thermal leggings and with a suit blazer.
When we reached the yoga hall, I couldn’t stop staring. It was a majestic space, a beautifully lit amphitheatre with 250,000 square feet of cement floors and padded cotton mats. The story went that Baba Ramdev had started teaching yoga in a modest 250-square-foot room. This amphitheatre was 1000 times bigger.
As musicians played drums on-stage, we cracked out our morning stiffness. I sat on my mat with my legs in front of me, reaching over to stretch my hamstrings. There was movement on the stage, a smudge of orange I immediately knew was Baba Ramdev. Later, I would see crowds of people walk up to touch his feet before backing away quickly, as if making contact with holy fire. We all stood to acknowledge his presence. Following everyone else’s lead, I raised both arms in salute, humming a general ohm in his direction. Despite the Hitler Youth connotations, the gesture was a genuinely beautiful thing: a collective of people harmonising our voices. It was as if we had connected on a metaphysical level.
Baba Ramdev signalled for us to sit down.
‘Welcome everyone,’ he said into the microphone, his voice echoing through the space.
He was wrapped in his usual robes: day-glo orange, the same colour you’d find at a rave. Two giant screens on either side of the stage projected Ramdev’s image as if he were Bono at a U2 concert. Zoomed in close, you could see all his features in high definition. He looked older than in the program’s photos and his right eye was visibly damaged, blinking out of sync with the left. However, his beard was as healthy and as thick as ever: an upside-down beehive with afro-level density. It was the kind of beard you could lose cutlery in.