Diary of a Maldivian recovering addict

By DCJ

From January to September 2008, Hilath was in rehab, at the DRC or the Drug Rehabilitation Centre at Himmafushi island in North Male’ Atoll, to clean himself of heroin after he had been abusing the stuff for about 4 months.

One fine afternoon, one of the other recovering addicts there, approached him and told him that he wanted to share some secrets. Hilath told me that over the next few months, Mukhtar and a few other addicts became very close to him and shared many secrets that they said they wouldn't dare share with anyone else - sometimes not even with their counselors.

Said Hilath: “The secrets they told me about themselves, their families and their experiences in Maldives, shocked me. I came to realize that a lot of creative and good youth had their lives ruined because the society had failed to take care of their basic needs; education, security, employment, creativity, entertainment and most importantly freedom of religion and sexual identity.

“For instance, this particular guy, who is from a southern island was very creative. Over the course of the next few months I learnt that he was very interested in films, science and even used to surf back in his island until he fell to heroin and then had to come to rehab. In fact, we shared many similar interests and soon he began to tell me his darkest secrets and fears. He said he had nobody to listen.”

Mukhtar is also quite good in English and he had written his everyday feelings in a daily “journal” which the DRC requires all clients to keep “to look back and ponder.”

“Every evening around 9pm, all the addicts are gathered in an open space, and asked to sit at a distance from one another and to write their honest thoughts in the journal. The journals are kept at a cupboard in the main hall, locked up and only released to the clients at the dedicated time,” says Hilath.

“For around 15 minutes or so, we are required to put in our thoughts. Anything if that would help us. Some would write in English while some would write in Dhivehi. Some never wrote anything at all but doodled and scribbled. But there was one guy who was a musician from a famous Maldivian band who used his journal to draw breathtaking art. Given that we only have pencils or pens to write, the artwork he produced was wondrous.”

Hilath also said that the journals are so “personal” and "confidential" in nature that it is an “offense” in DRC for anyone to access another client’s journal.

“Even counselors are forbidden to look at the journals ever. Our head counselor explained that the journals was a means by which a client can record his honest thoughts while undergoing the ‘treatment’ at the DRC so that he can always sincerely reflect back on his life which hopefully will be therapeutic and healing for him for all times to come.”

Hilath himself kept a journal but he said he may never reveal its contents because “it’s too personal” though we don’t know why he said that since we all know that the whole Maldives now knows basically every aspect of his personal life ;) We are just kidding. What Hilath really meant was that since almost every detail of his personal life is in the public domain, if he brought out his own journal, people can still identify the people involved in his stories even if we change the names in order to protect their identities :)

Hilath recently met Mukhtar when he was in Male’ after a long time and told us that Mukhtar was keeping clean of all substances over the past two years. Interestingly, said Hilath, Mukhtar having read the two episodes of our Dhivehi story series, FAARU, was interested in publishing his DRC journal with the names changed since there was little chance that people could really pinpoint any particular person because Mukhtar’s life is not as famous as Hilath’s!

We couldn’t agree more...

So we have got the original journal from Mukhtar and seems he had started writing in his journal on the 7th day since he joined the DRC. He hasn’t written on every day during his own 8 or so months there (the maximum period at DRC is 9 months) and some entries are dated days apart.

Due to MANY reasons we have decided to publish Mukhtar’s journal, without changing a word. Though he doesn’t make grammatical errors, his English is somewhat abrupt but, given that he is only allowed around 15 minutes or so to write in his journal, the succinct entries interestingly still give an in-depth look into his perceptions not only about himself but about everyone and every place that has come into contact with him so far in his life.

At the end of the day, we came to the same conclusion as Hilath: the Therapeutic Community (TC) concept which is applied at DRC is not working. It’s a very outdated, not to mention Conservative, concept where things are run mostly like a “scout or cadet camp” where you are forced to do a lot of things you may not necessarily like doing.

And you are given punishments in the form of “clean-ups” (cleaning landscapes or doing the dishes, i.e. "Pot Sink") for even simple things as missing a prayer. So we hope that at the end of the day, the government will either be forced to shut down this abomination known as DRC which is wasting a lot of public funds uselessly, or else modify its program to suit its individual clients’ needs. As the Human Rights Commission pointed out in 2008 itself, during that year when Hilath and Mukhtar were there, there wasn’t a single professionally trained psychiatrist at DRC in 2008 and we still called it a rehab!

As Hilath told us after coming back from DRC: “The program at DRC is not tailored for individual needs. Rather it’s like one single formula for one group. And for a person who suffers from Bipolar Disorder Type 2 like me, the 8 months I spent at DRC were the worst days of my life.

"And I suspect Mukhtar also suffered because he also somewhat showed signs of bipolarity because he did a lot of things impulsively which put him in a lot of trouble. At first I thought he was just rebelling but later I found him a very sensitive soul and most of the time he was acting not necessarily of his own will but due to constant mood swings which he seemed unable to control by himself.

“I told my counselor that all I needed was cognitive behavior therapy coupled with privacy and private time to engage in a creative thing I like but of course TC program being like a military camp there was no choice for me. The TC program seems to have been designed to instill behavior and discipline in street kids and disregards the fact that addicts also really need psychiatric evaluation and psychological therapy.”

For our own selfish reasons, we will post only one entry per day, to ensure that you guys and gals keep visiting this blog so that this blog retains its popularity -- why run a blog that is not read, huh? ;)

The other reason is of course not to overwhelm readers with too much information. Some of the daily entries by Mukhtar really left us pondering for a while and some entries made us feel downright sad or glum.

At the end of the day, we hope that by bringing Mukhtar’s diary in full, completely unabridged, it will prove beneficial for humans who honestly seek knowledge and enlightenment about the other half of the Maldives’ society. Perhaps your empathy can go a long way in contributing to correcting the “mistakes” of this society. In fact, that is the only unselfish reason why we have decided to publish Mukhtar’s diary on this blog.

So!

Everything’s going fine. Just great.

The only complaint against us so far is that we have not revealed our team members who run this blog ;-)

If we had forgotten to mention before, let’s get it straight again…

This blog used to be run by one person but his identity was comprised and about a year later he handed over the management to a group of Maldivian lawyers, including myself, who have a single common interest: exposing the dark realities of Maldives’ society.

As lawyers, we have seen everything there is too see in Maldives. We have seen individuals, whole families and even groups of people trapped physically or psychologically in situations that are degrading and should never occur in a small society like Maldives. As I am always fond of saying, perhaps Anni should hand over the Maldives’ governance to a multinational corporation and I am sure our small country and economy (if there is one) will be managed well and we won’t see guys and gals struggling with issues regarding belief and sexuality nor people living in economically depraved situations, nor the apathetic, anti-social, violent attitudes we see today. Life insurance and pension and retirement schemes will easily be taken care of!

We believe that should we keep on ignoring one half of our society, and treat such topics as taboo subjects, Maldives will continue down the road to hell. As lawyers with a conscience (ironic I know!), we thought we could both enlighten and entertain Maldivians by bringing out these real stories and characters through creative methods such as the serial story we have already started. It doesn’t matter whether we are anonymous because the important thing is to bring out to the public these true Maldivian stories but with people's and places’ names changed in order to protect their identities.

The reason why we can’t reveal ourselves is because as lawyers we have a duty to our clients and you can guess in a society like this if we identify ourselves how this could not only affect our career but jeopardize our clients’ interests as well. Needless to say we decided to remain anonymous.

FAARU is our own South Park-like Dhivehi story series where in each “episode”, we bring true incidents involving the Maldivian underground subcultures but with their names and places changed so that their identities will remain secret. Though our setting for FAARU is sometime after the Presidential elections of 2018, that setting was decided on because it will give us a lot of room to manipulate the time and venue of the incidents described in the “episodes” just to make sure that no one can ever link the stories to the real persons involved.
Originally some of us wanted to bring FAARU in English but Hilath said that the English-speaking audience more or less knows what’s really happening and therefore the people we “really need to reach across are the other half of the society whose ignorance (not least of English language) is not only dragging themselves down but dragging us into the abyss alongside them. Only when that segment of the society knows what’s really happening in the other segment of the society can then tolerance and empathy come and only then the whole society will start cooperating to make life tolerable for every individual. This Kasauti society needs to wake up to the fact that Maldives is now not a country with a shared language nor a shared religion and therefore the ‘underground’ half of the Maldives society has a lifestyle which is normal for them but which will be shocking to your average Kasauti-watching relative.”

So we hope to continue FAARU and we hope that it serves as our own small contribution to raising awareness - by making the whole society aware that there are two societies living side by side in Maldives (Conservatives and Liberals) and that, within these two larger societies, there are many many subcultures which will shock you but which will be normal for those who live that lifestyle.

Because there are going to be lots of entries on this blog now, we are going to have two main CATEGORIES/LABELS on the side of this blog labeled FAARU – Dhivehi Story Series and Diary of a Maldivian Recovering Addict so that readers can easily access the relevant blogposts they want to read.

Dhen… hmmm… Stay tuned.