Burmese Refugee Youth Prevent Addiction & Violence

The DARE All Burma Community Addiction Manual is now complete! A huge success for the team that opens up many opportunities and will strengthen our future programs.  

The manual contains instructions and details of our entire program. From detox massage to community prevention education. It has been developed by our local staff, in only local languages – Karen and Burmese.

DARE’s mission is to build the capacity and strength of the local people to support other community members to recover from addiction. The completion of this manual is very rewarding for the team, who have worked extremely hard on it for many yearsl. It will be a key tool in the spread of addiction awareness, education and recovery along the borderline, in Burma and overseas in third countries.

It will enable people in remote areas to begin to provide awareness, education and basic treatment. It will enable more people to be trained as Addiction Workers, and those trainers we already have to use their skills to train more people in more places.

Law La Say our Program Coordinator was the lead on this project from start to finish.  He directed what was to go in, how the program was to be explained and completed the translation into Burmese.

He said about the completion of the manual:

”In 2002 and 2004 we started to create a manual, we used this for a few years but needed to add more after developing extra modules and feedback from the community. Since then we have been hoping for an opportunity to put all the knowledge together. We have so much knowledge from our time that we have learned and shared, that we decided that if we can put all the information together it will be so useful and much easier for our program, it will be our gift to the program. If ever DARE is gone, or we cannot reach somewhere, the manual will live on as a gift to the community.”

Major, our Assistant Program Coordinator learnt a lot from the process of developing the manual, another huge benefit from the process. He was the main formatter, editor and also did Karen translations. He said about the manual:

”We have support from the other people in the team who can help when something is not correct, so together with my increased skills and the team support I feel more confident to do more things for DARE”

The internal and external gain from the process and actual manual itself are almost immeasurable. We look forward to implementing it here and seeing it be used to help others around the world.

We would like to thank our funders for the manual project; Refugees International Japan and the Dave and Kerry Foundation for their generosity and continued support of our project.

Until next time,

The DARE Team.