Training Reports

• Jingpo 3rd Training Slideshow 1
• Jingpo 3rd Training Slideshow 2
• Jingpo 3rd Training Slideshow 3
• Jingpo Dancing Slideshow
• Jingpo Dancing Video 1
• Jingpo Dancing Video 2
• Jingpo Karaoke Video
• More Videos

The 3rd training took place in a Jingpo village. I have a special connection with the Jingpo people, also known as Kachins in Burma. My Grandparents worked in Kachin State in Northern Burma for many years and came to love those people very much.

I still have family working in Burma stemming from their experiences and connections with these people, and my interest in Burma and eventual decision to come to work in this field and this region can be connected to my families history in the region and to my visits to Kachin State and Burma with my father when I was 19 and later as a University student doing research and working as a volunteer during my undergrad and post grad studies.

The Jingpo are a very musical and fun-loving group of people. There was much song and dance, and drinking (which is very different than my experiences in Kachin State as most of the Jingpo there, especially in the cities, are Christian and while they still dance and sing like no other, have given up drinking as part of their religion).

They even dragged me up on stage to sing despite my claims that its not part of our culture to sing. My cries fell on deaf ears. I sang Kenny Roger’s “The Gambler” (a personal fave) poorly. They had a band and a dance troupe performing traditional dances and songs. The photos will give you a bit of a picture. We had to be on our toes and change the subject to our work or we would have been there watching them sing and dance all night.

We tried something different this time for our training that was very successful. We divided the participants up into more groups than we had before, and we began working in small groups right from the start. We broke the groups up into young men, young women and children, and older men and women respectively.

We started the information session in this manner, and then we broke for introductions and song and dance, and then came back to these groups afterwards. We finished with everyone together and had a competition between these groups based on the information sessions that we had just finished.

We all felt like it worked better than what we had tried before, in fact I would have to say that it’s the best session we have had yet. Glad to to feel that we are learning and growing as a group as we work.

When I asked the village heads what they thought about the training; if it was a success and if they had ever had training like this before they replied that while they have had government workers come in and deliver information on HIV and HIV prevention, it wasn’t successful because it was so boring. Someone would read off a piece of paper, and villagers would slowly disappear from the crowd until all that were left were the people attached to the village committee… i.e. people who had to be there.

Our interactive approach was fun and they thought it was a much better way to get across the message/information to their people. There were still a couple dozen of people (mostly young people) who hung outside of the groups watching the training from afar and not really participating, but for the most part there were over a hundred people who seemed really interested and participated accordingly. And they didn’t want to let us go either, we didn’t get out of there until well past midnight, finishing with a large group dance in which everyone danced around in a large circle. Pretty cool to see and be apart of.

This village was more wealthy than the previous De’Ang villages we had worked in. With the wealth comes a different situation. While in the De’Ang situation poverty, giving rise to prostitution, was the leading cause of HIV transmission, in this Jinghpaw village injecting drug use is the main cause of HIV transmission, and unprotected sex a close second.

A very sad moment in the training came as a woman in her late 50’s who had obviously been drinking too much wailed at us that it wasn’t fair that we had only now just come to give this training and not before. She had already lost 3 sons to HIV.