Human Rights Online Philippines

What’s short for murder? – Abbreviations of the Philippine civil society
by Joonas Rundgren
March 3, 2015

One of the first challenges I faced working in a Philippine human rights NGO was the working language. By this I don’t mean the often confusing mix of English and Tagalog, but the amount of abbreviations you can sometimes hear in just one sentence.

The first case I got involved with at TFDP I could’ve not understand a thing without knowing what are DENR, DAR and CARP, or in other words, Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Department of Agrarian Reform and Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program. Not to feel like a complete idiot while just having an everyday conversation with someone from the Philippine NGO field, you also should be comfortable with acronyms for Department of Justice (DOJ), Commission on Human Rights (CHR), Department of National Defence (DND), Department of Budget and Management (DBM) and so on and so on.
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However, the very first strings of letters that got me confused were the ones next to the family names on the folders beside my desk – What are all these EJKs, ARDs and HARs?

Here is an explanation for what an EJK and an ARD/HAR can actually mean in real life.

Read full article @joonasrundgren.wordpress.com

Joonas is a 27-year-old walker-thinker-writer-lawyer from Finland now based in Quezon City, Metro Manila.

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