 I'm thinking that harm reduction is so much more than just reducing harm, you know. That this is a movement of social justice and of human rights. And the model of this conference is at the heart of the response. I think at the heart of the response are those people who are really fighting this fight in the first place. And these are people who are strikes of their organizations. And this session is an excellent example of harm reduction beyond, you know, just public health. Harm reduction is not only like a set of public health interventions, like how the human remains, for example, like part of the comprehensive package to prevent HIV-AIDS among injecting drug users or how the drug policy makers define it as, you know, just a supplementary thing besides law enforcement and treatment. So for us, harm reduction is a movement for human rights and social justice. And I'm very glad to, today we will hear very powerful stories of how communities of drug users could self-organize and create their resistance movement against very, very repressive environments. So at this session, we will hear from activists from all over, all around the world. First, we will hear a story from Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia, from Sudnau, who explains us how drug user activists navigate within the complex network of religious leaders, unofficial authorities, and anti-drug vigilante groups. Then we will have a presentation from Afghanistan, actually, from a user group that is fighting for the rights of a group of people who live, I think, literally under the bridge in the streets of Kabul in very, very difficult environments. Unfortunately, the presenter, Atta Rahman Ahmad, could not make it. He didn't get visa to Canada. So he's one of those people who were excluded, actually, from this conference. So Matt Salswa, my friend, will present in the name of him. And then we will have an activist from here, from Canada, Alexandra De Quitt. Do I pronounce your name properly? De Quitt. De Quitt. So she is an activist from British Columbia, and she will talk about how communities of people who use drugs try to... Montreal. Sorry, Montreal. Okay. And so how drug users try to survive in this terrible overdose epidemic in North America. And then we will have Igor Gordon from my own region, from the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network, who will explain how street lawyers are documenting, document human rights abuses among people who use drugs. So please keep your questions after the whole presentation. So we will have the questions in the end and answers. And I also ask the presenters to keep the time limit, which is 10, 12 minutes. So please, so... Hello, everyone. Let me introduce again myself. My name is Sudhnau from Myanmar, working with the Middle Development Foundation. And now we are working as a partner with the Medicine Dream Moon, France, MDM. So... So today is the last day. Time is flying so quick. So, yeah. There's one... But new things I heard when I... Just minutes ago. So there's a newspaper writing about one of my friends around from the Mijina town had been beaten by the anti-drug vigilante group. So that was so... Make me feeling like very sad. Because actually, this is not the first time, but... This is kind of like... Have been doing these kinds of things for years. But, you know, I'm from... I'm working with drug users. So I'm part of them. So I'm just feeling like very sad. So this is bad news for me. So now feeling like a bit... How could I say? Feeling sad. So now I'm... But I'm trying to speak about the rest of my presentation. So before I jump into the presentation... Before I jump into the presentation... I... How could I say? There's a lot of bad things come to me when I was in Myanmar. But because of my friends, they support me a lot. So, you know, like my... My visa got refused. And I lost my passport on the last day before I came here in Myanmar. So, yeah. But everything, you know, I could make it against all odds. So I really would like to say thank you to all of my friends. So now... So I'm going to present... This is the contents of my presentation. So I'm going to... I will present about the main element of the context where we are implementing the project. And then I'm going to present about the... Strategy and objective of the board organization. After presentation of the challenges and strengths... Then I'm going to conclude with the lesson learned and also the documentary. So, the title of the event I'm going to present is about the activism. So there's no drug users activism in Kachin, Kachin State, Myanmar. But there's a strong resistance and... There's a strong resistance and organized movement against the drug users in northern parts of Kachin State. Northern parts of Myanmar, Kachin State. So they have a... They have a... They have a short kind of like very powerful. It's a kind of like a growing barrier for the organization to implement harm reduction. So, for example, let's say a couple of months ago, MDM even had to close one DIC in Mugung area. So now the project... Now I'm going to present the project. Now we are doing its... It's aiming at tackling the barrier and to incorporate the target community and generate the enabling environment. That is the project now we are doing. So this is the Kachin State. So Kachin State is located between India and China, with the population of around 1.7 million. So all the population are mixing. Most of the majorities are the Kachin, Chan, Burmese and the multicultural. So this is the Kachin State to imagine what it looks like. So this is the picture of the anti-drug Bajalanti group. They went to the area a bit far from the Mijinatao and they're trying to opium-free. So this is the picture of them. So as you all know, Myanmar is the second largest opium producer up to the African nations. So there's... Northern Kachin State has highest HIV, highest burden of drug problematic drug use and also that related with the HIV prevalence that reach up to 75% in Kachin State, in some townships in Kachin State according to the IBBS 2014. And also there's a high number of drug users and another factor that's contributing the situation to be worse is the 60 years of violent conflict. That is another issue. And also Kachin State is a very rural and limited public services, transportation and poor transportation infrastructure. So that's how the barrier. And also another thing is the powerful activism. Now I'm talking about the anti-drug committee which is formed by the different kinds of... This is formed by the community themselves, community leaders like the religious leader and also the lay persons, all members from different kinds of religious they are involving and they form the budget fund by themselves and they are against the drug users and also they are destroying the opium fee in the Kachin State. So based on this thing, harm reduction intervention cannot be put in place without the support of the general community. So let's just see the one example which have been occurred in the Mugung area, the center which is run by the medicine team and MDM had even closed because of this problem. I'm Sudno's assistant. So we're trying to get a two-minute vision of what is happening. You had what? The same problem? So since I'm standing here, let me just try to complement a little bit what you were saying in the beginning. Sudno's friend who was beaten up actually passed away because he was beaten up that badly. And this is another picture of what we're talking about in the Kachin State when we talk about community resistance. Source, we traveled to Asia's meth heartland, a region in Myanmar stretching to the... Sorry guys, it's gonna be just in a smaller frame. Does that work for you? It's a militia group in time to be full assist the government in whatever they need to do. Sorry for that. To get closer to the source, we traveled to Asia's meth heartland, a region in Myanmar stretching to the borders of China and Thailand where meth production and addiction is out of control. I think that's why we're here. We're here to help. We're here to help. We're here to help. We're here to help. We're here to help. We're here to help. We're here to help. We're here to help. Two raw has seen his home region particularly ravaged by drugs. He's one of a neglected minority, the Kachin. Christians converted centuries ago by American missionaries. Facing government in action, two raw is part of a new crusade, recruiting church members to join a citizen-led struggle against the drug epidemic. What is this vigilante movement all about? Now, this is the cluster. What is this vigilante movement all about? The movement called Pajasang is among the largest of these anti-drug groups. But these church-goers don't just mourn against the dangers of men. They're detaining suspected addicts, pulling pork and punishing them when they step out of line. The Pajasang vigilantes allowed global posts special access to film as they go out on their nighttime raids. Sorry, that didn't work that well. So sorry, the subtitles dropped out, but I think it gives a picture. I don't think it's worth to go back again and try it all again. But it explains who's the Pajasang, who's a community-led resistance, what Sutno already was saying. As you can see, it's not just a few neighbors here and there, it's a real big movement. And as you can see, they take completely the authority in their own hands and they arrest people, lock them up and beat them up, up to what just happened recently to Sutno's friend. So let us just go back to the rest of the presentation. It was just to give you a picture of what is happening. Sorry for incorporating ends. Actually, I would like to show all the pictures of the documentary, but sorry. So anyway, maybe you can also catch up somehow. How is the happening in the next Tuesday? So now I'm going to talk about the MDM and MITA collaboration. So as you admit, MDM is an international humanitarian organization and working with drug users in Myanmar for more than 20 years. And MITA is also a leading national non-governmental organization established in 1927 and working together with the community on community development and the humanitarian response. And then in the sense of partnership, now we are changing and learning each other. So for example, let's say we have different kinds of expertise. So MITA is an expert on the local advocacy and the community mobilizing. So MDM also has an expert on the harm reduction, intervention and the capacity building. So it is the things that now based on this thing, now we are doing partnership and run the community-led harm reduction project in Kachin State. So the key intervention, there will be three. The first one is enhanced capacity breathing. And also the second one is to increase the service delivery. And the third one is the advocacy. So advocacy is the most important thing now we are doing. It is really important to increase the acceptance of the general community and also to have our project and also could run it. So it is the things that now the Kachin context is quite different from other. So really we have to do a lot of series of advocacy and then we can also do the... After that we can do the service delivery part. So methodology, it is the pilot project now we are doing. It's now almost one year. And also there's another thing, they are key stakeholders. Now we formed the local ADS committee. So local ADS committee are comprised of different stakeholders like religious leader and women leaders, youth leaders, they all are involved in the local ADS committee. And now our project providing a series of training to them and they are playing as a key role among the community. So a key achievement, what we have so far is like we already opened fight center in four fight locations. And also we provided the capacity breathing for more than 50 staff and we are still doing ongoing advocacy with different stakeholders. So challenges, the challenges is maybe you can also imagine to convince the community leaders is really take time. At the very first time we talk about the harm reduction but they are strongly opposed it. But after time by time we are trying to convince them and then finally they accept it and then we now can run the project here like this. But in the general speaking at the very first time it's very challenging, it's really take time. And then there's also now we are run the fight center in a fight location and then all the drug anti-Nagoda anti-drug vigilantes are somehow understand on the harm reduction and supporting the project. But the rest of the village there are still a lot of committees so we still have to convince, we have to reach out more committees so this is the challenge we still need to work on. And then there's another lay presence, general lay presence, you know. So there is also the way, but you already seen the movie before that the way they trick to the drug users is kind of like detentions and sometimes they also open a force rehabilitation center and send them to the center. So this is the things that they are doing. So resulting in the kind of like a human right violation. So and also continuous process. So the challenge is to continue the process that really take time to natural understanding and also support the program as well as those anti-drug committees. So the strengths, the strengths are the ultimate strength of community leadership and the ownership. And the second is that we have, we already formed the local ADS committee in the village level so they understand on the harm reduction and supporting. So under this support of leadership of local ADS committee the acceptance and the perception is really high. So this is the good things and based on these strengths now we are trying to move forward. So lesson learned. So far we, the good communication have been established between which the local ADS committee and also the not got the anti-drug vigilante group. So this is the potential for the sustainability. So now we are keep trying to work on this. So on the other hand we meet our work on changing the people of the general population but it's still take time. But for example let's say so far the pilot project for one year we could see that we distributed only 30,000 syringe and nearly reduced to one example. So at the very first step we took a lot of time to convince the anti-drug committee. So then the initial investment is high but later once the community know the ownership and then it's kind of like the participation are very high and kind of like rewarding and high cost efficiency. So it is the community based approach now we are doing. So the last thing is model is based on a long-term vision. It is investment for the future but it has great potential but the things, but it is not unclear because of the effective it will be in term of the public health. So because the rest of the now we haven't convinced to all the budgets and committees so now we are going to work on these things so we still have to challenge. The challenge would be coming from the community again so we still have to work on these things. So these are the lessons we have been learning from our pilot project. Thank you so much.