Blog

Homepage•Blog
Reintegration
Pals User

Would You Have Done the Same?

D. is the newest and youngest human trafficking survivor taking up residence at our Lao Cai Compassion House. Despite not ever receiving formal education and being illiterate, D. is proving to be one of the most tenacious young women we have met. She understands the challenges ahead of her and she has expressed determination to obtain an education as well as vocational training so that she can better protect herself and her family against exploitation in the future. The most immediate care that D. needed was medical to help heal the infections on her legs. Once that was done, we have started to work with her on reading and writing skills.

Below is her story:

As the youngest child in my family, I have four older sisters and two older brothers. When I was fourteen, I was forced into a marriage. My husband at the time was twenty-year-old and even though he was also Hmong, we did not speak the same language since he is from a different Hmong tribe. He was extremely abusive. Four months later, my sister ended up marrying into the same family (she married his older cousin) and was also severely abused. Unlike me, she would scream and fight back whenever he was abusive towards her. It was inevitable that her abusive husband would one day kill her. Upon my sister’s death, my family found out the dire situation that I was in and rescued me from my abusive husband.

Shortly after I returned home, a stranger called me on the telephone to tell me of a promising work opportunity. I agreed and upon arrival in China, he immediately sold me to a Hmong couple who then sold me as a bride to a thirty-year-old Chinese man. I cried hysterically every single day until he eventually could not take it anymore and ended up selling me to someone else. In this new home, I paid careful attention to the man’s daily routine so that I could look for my window to escape. I pretended to love and care for this man so that I could gain his trust.

After about two weeks, he came home from work one day in a very good mood. Once he fell asleep and stopped responding to my inquiries, I snuck over to his coat and grabbed the keys and the little money that he had in his pockets. That day was only the second time in my life that I have ever seen an elevator (the first day was when I was first sold to him), and I was not sure how one worked. I frantically paced the floor, terrified that he would wake up and catch me, but I really did not know what to do. Suddenly, a different man approached the elevator and pressed a button. He motioned me to enter, so I did. I did not want to speak to him because I did not want to arise any suspicion since I did not know how to speak Chinese. Since I knew that we were on one of the higher floors, I motioned down with my finger. Luckily this worked and once I got to the ground floor, I ran with all of my might.

For the next ten days, I would only allow myself to eat a couple of banh bao and bottles of water because I was afraid I would run out of money. At night, I would hide in the bushes to try to sleep but it was hard to do because of all the noises and mosquitoes. After a few days, my entire body was covered in mosquito bites that swelled up. I was exhausted and sickly looking; I lost hope and was eventually driven to despair. All I could think about was my mother who was probably worried to death about me. I thought to myself, “If I cannot return home to my family, I would rather die than be sold again.”

So I tried to take my own life by jumping over a bridge and into a river. That was when two Chinese men who were wearing some type of uniform saved me. I could not understand what they were discussing but I could tell that the sight of me disgusted them: I smelled bad and was covered in swollen red welts. I could tell that they were worried that I might have been contagious with whatever it was that they thought I had because they immediately took me to a hospital to get a check-up. After the hospital cleared me, they did not know what to do with me so they locked me up in prison where I stayed for the next four months. They finally introduced me to someone who spoke Vietnamese and I was finally able to tell someone that I was from Vietnam and that I needed to go home.

I am just a young Hmong girl. I was never given the opportunity to attend school. Because I don’t know how to read and write, I always thought that I would not amount to anything. Now, I am given a second chance at life and I will do everything to prove I deserve it. Tell me, if you were in my situation, would you have done the same [try to escape]?

“I’m not sure. I would like to think that I have that much courage to escape those horrible conditions,” responded Ms. Phuong Thao, our program manager.

Phuong Thao Nguyen and Hang Tran

Reintegration
Pals User

She Protects Us In Her Gaze

The transaction was carried out in the stillness of the night, where the only spotlight on the furtive affair came from the brightness of the full moon. It was on that night that my adopted mother decided to name me after the moon goddess, Hắng Nga. The goddess protected us in her warmth, and she protected me in her gaze. I stare up at the moon during Tết Trung Thu, or the mid-autumn festival, every year since the discovery of my adoption. I think about how they must have felt when they gave me up. I think about the tears that must have singed my birth mother’s face. And I think about what it must mean to want to protect our children.

I haven’t celebrated tết traditionally in nearly twenty-years; this year, I was able to celebrate it for the first time in Vietnam. The festival occurs during the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar months of the Lunar calendar (usually somewhere in mid-September) and is truly considered a festival for the children. The tradition began as a way for parents to make up for lost time with their children due to long hours during harvest season. Dark streets become ablaze with colorfully lit lanterns, and the once murky river is now covered in a veil of twinkling lights.

This has also been my first couple of weeks with Pacific Links Foundation. I have been working with the girls at our reintegration shelter in Long Xuyen all week long to prepare for the Moon Festival. But really, what that means is that I sat and watched their handicraft with amazement. The girls cut and shave large bamboo poles down to a more pliable material, and then the sticks are configured into a 3D shape of their choosing (usually a star or a cylinder). It’s rare nowadays for people to make these lanterns by hand since they can be easily picked up around the corner for less than a dollar. But besides the perennial challenge of working on a small budget, what we try to instill in these girls at every turn is a sense of ingenuity and resourcefulness. The ultimate goal is to foster their ability to survive without the organization and the mentors. In a sense, they must learn to become as pliable as the lantern’s infrastructure. This week, I learn that this is what protecting our children meant.

It has been estimated by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) that one in five victims of human trafficking are children, and in poorer regions like the Mekong delta where we work, that number is much higher. While trafficking for sexual exploitation has gained traction in the public consciousness, other forms of trafficking such as forced labor, debt bondage, involuntary domestic servitude, and forced organ removal are less well known. Trafficking victims are often lured by the people they know –acquaintances, friends, lovers, and even family – and are recruited through deception and false promises of a more worthwhile life. What are the consequences of this treacherous recruiting tactic? How will the deceit from a kin pull at the fibers of our community? – Because everyone here is a relative. Everyone is your uncle (chú), your aunt (cô), your sister (chị) and your brother (anh). Our relationship to others is encapsulated within our language; and therein lies the root of our trust.

We don’t have the luxury of treating these girls like children. We have to think twice or three times before we do something as simple as buy them a treat or a toy to play with. We have to think about the message behind all of our words and actions. As much as I would like to sit beside them as a friend—as a sister—and treat them to all the delicacies that I think they are entitled to as a child, I must first keep in mind our program’s objective of cultivating self-reliance. The reintegration process must also, therefore, address the vulnerability of victims to further exploitation. Our role is to provide a safe and enabling environment for recovery and development. But our success will ultimately be defined in their capacity to care for themselves and to make the right decisions.

Hang Tran

Reintegration
Pals User

Will to Succeed

During her escape from the monsters who trafficked and kept her captive, she suffered severe scratches throughout her whole body, a huge foot infection that did not want to heal, thirst and hunger to the point of complete exhaustion …Hugging the young, shy and little girl who burst into tears when recalling her ordeal, I felt in my arms a person of immense greatness.

Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, Translated by Pacific Links Foundation Team

Reintegration
Pals User

Is She a Trafficking Survivor?

Riding a motorbike slowly around the intersections near the border gate, a young woman caught my eyes. Many stories told to us by trafficking survivors kept churning in my head … Poor young women from the rural areas, led by their ill-fated job search, were deceived and trafficked across borders, where they were locked up, beaten, and forced to work in brothels for an interminable time. I do not know who that young woman is or whether she had gone through the horrid scenarios of those who were trafficked. Hopefully, this was just my imagination. But if she were a survivor, I hope that she could gather her courage, that of a survivor, to go home, to be a human being again. What is most needed is the understanding of and help from a community to let her heal and give her strength to find herself again.

Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, Translated by Pacific Links Foundation Team

Reintegration
Pals User

Humanizing Experiences: A Mural Project on Home and Dreams

“What do you think of, when you think of home?”

“I think of our family, sitting and eating together. I think of my mom, my dad, my uncle, aunt, and brother. And I think of my brother’s laugh as we joke around during dinner.”

“What are your dreams?”

“I dream of seeing the ocean for the first time. I dream of being a really great student so I can find a job that is secure to help support my family.”

Each woman full with stories of their past shared bittersweet memories of home and what it means for them to create a new life for themselves. It is important to see the humanity of the young women we work with. It is important to empower the young women to not be defined by the stigma of what happened to them but to reclaim their past, their history, and their cultural roots to solidly pave a path for their future.

The mural project was created from just that desire, to humanize these young women. The project was developed from the belief that these women are more than just trafficked returnees, but are whole human beings who have a history, a culture, hopes, and dreams. I journeyed with the women living at Compassion House, our Reintegration Shelter in Lao Cai, for 10 days, sharing stories of home and drawing memories of the past and visions for the future. 

Here is a photo journal of our process:

Patricia Nguyen

GEMS
Pals User

Business as usual: home visits to scholarship recipients

As we do every year, today we organized a team of staff members to visit the homes of the students in the scholarship program. This time the whole office went, a total of seven people, three of whom are volunteers, including one volunteer who was a recipient of our program a few years ago and has now come back to lend a hand.

We boarded An Hoa Ferry on four motorbikes, headed in the direction of Dong Thap province. This time, our team was planning to visit Phu Thanh A Middle School, Phu Ninh Middle School, Tam Nong High School, and Hong Ngu High School.

We were greeted at Phu Thanh A middle school by Teacher P. and the students in our scholarship program from this school. We split into groups so that we could follow the students back to their homes to meet their families and document their conditions – as we do every year. Everyone was hustling and smiling, calling to each other, borrowing motorbike helmets, and suggesting which students would return home first and which students would stay behind to wait for the next group. It was with this fervor and excitement that we hopped onto our bikes and hit the road, splitting off into various directions.

I was in the group that went with Teacher P.,  who has been assigned to help our program on behalf of the school for the past seven years. It is rare to find a teacher who is as enthusiastic as him, and who has such deep knowledge about the students’ circumstances as he does. Many of these students have dropped out of school early because of extremely difficult family situations. It has been tricky, but Teacher P. has worked with our scholarship program to encourage and support the girls to return to school. Today, when I was looking for the homes of the high school students in our program, who are no longer attending this teacher’s school anymore, he was still happy to show me the roads to each of their homes.

When I rode with Teacher P., I was able to learn a lot of information about the students before I got to their homes to talk to their families. Sadly, I also learned that this year, in Phu Thanh district, many families would not be celebrating the Lunar New Year because this area was one of the districts that were hit hardest by the unusually severe 2011 flood season. Many homes had sunk into the ground or had collapsed because the foundational columns sat in standing water for so long and had rotted. For people who worked the farms and fields, all of their crops had been ruined. Everything they’d planted had died and been washed away by floodwaters. Those who made a living from catching fish or picking vegetables had been tied to their homes because of the high floodwaters, and those who were day laborers waited for calls from employers that never came. On the road, I could see evidence of the things Teacher P. was telling me. There were many stretches of the road, deep in the fields, that had been eroded. In many places, the sinkage was extremely deep and the traces of the floodwater’s trails were still visible in the sand.

When we reached the home of L., an eighth-grade student who has lost both parents, her paternal grandmother said worriedly “The floods lasted so long that the foundational columns of the house turned to pulp. When will the house collapse? The debts have piled up because the water took so long to retreat”.

T., who is in the tenth grade, is also an orphan. At her home, I learned that her grandmother used to work as a hired day laborer, planting and cutting rice stalks and picking water spinach from the fields. She told me that she has been taking care of her two granddaughters since they were little girls. Her primary income comes from cleaning up the fields after harvest, gathering the leftover rice stalks, and selling them. Now that the rice fields are almost completely harvested by machines, her labor is unnecessary. In addition, the machines collect the seedling rice stalks more efficiently, so there are no leftover rice seedlings for her to gather, and the woman has lost this important source of income. But T.’s grandmother is someone who takes initiative, and so she found a new trade-in traditional medicine and acupressure. The woman told me that the work was somewhat like volunteerism: anyone with a headache, a runny nose, or sore muscles would call her and she would come to perform acupressure, steam inhalation, and other such traditional remedies for them. Those with money would give her 5,000 – 7,000 VND ($0.25 – $0.30), and for those without money, she would perform the services simply to help them.

In the middle of the day, I visited the homes of two girls who had dropped out of school.

When I arrived at the home of N., a tenth grader who has lost her father and had been an excellent student for many years before she dropped out one month ago, I stopped in surprise before the door of a house that lay in shambles. It was completely different than the warm and rosy picture I had seen on the previous visits. I walked through the narrow doorway lined with weeds into a room speckled with patches of sunlight that were shining through the holes in the walls. The rays of sunlight danced on the small table that had been N.’s study table, where there were still piles of neatly stacked schoolbooks and notebooks with N.’s handwriting. The table looked lonely today, so different from the lively picture I’d seen on previous visits because today I wasn’t greeted by N.’s gentle smile. On a bamboo bed across from me, N.’s maternal grandmother lay staring blankly at the floor. She has some form of severe eczema, and her entire body was covered in peeling patches of white and red skin. N.’s little sister was sitting at the head of the bed, staring at me. It was noon, but the kitchen was cold and the two women, one young and one old, sat silently like stones. N.’s grandmother said that her grandfather had been in the hospital constantly, and the family was in extreme hardship. As the only wage earner, N.’s mother couldn’t make ends meet, and had decided to take N. out of school so that she could become an apprentice at a beautician’s shop in town, to help take care of the grandparents and her little sister. I demanded many times, an angry tone in my voice, “Why did our scholarship program help N. so much, only to have you take her out of school so easily? What happened to the commitment you had to keep your daughter in school through the twelfth grade?”

I stopped by the market, following the tip that N. was studying to be a beautician at “Tien” hair salon. I paced back and forth in the tiny countryside market that had only four or five salons before I discovered a tiny shop at the back of the market with a big “Kim Tuyen” sign. When I got a little closer, it was easy to recognize N. behind the store, shampooing a customer next to another girl. She stood out among the other girls with their thick makeup and red-dyed hair because of her beautiful simplicity. I noticed the strands of her long black hair tied back in a ponytail, and I noticed her two cheeks flushed from working in the afternoon sun. It was so different than the pale expression I’d seen before when Ms. Kieu Nhi, a former Program Director, helped her go to Ho Chi Minh City for a heart operation. I went into the store and asked for a shampoo, pointing to N. and saying that she was the one I wanted to wash my hair.

After that N.’s story became clearer. I found out that she had cried many times in order to arrive at this decision. Her grandparents were sick all the time. Because her home was so far from school, she had to ask a friend to take her by motorbike but had been unable to come up with the gas money. Her mother had worked at a garment factory 7 kilometers from their home for the past five months but hadn’t yet received a penny of salary. She told me she had to go to work in order to help keep her younger sister in school!

Although it’s been seven years since I started working with Pacific Links Foundation, it seems like it was just yesterday. I see these students several times each year, but I’m always surprised at how much they have changed and grown. One day they are little girls in elementary and middle school, but when I turn my eyes away for just a second, I turn back to see that they have become teenagers. From my perspective, the time has flown by, but I wonder whether the time has flown for these girls, who are doing their best to take care of their parents, their grandparents, and their younger siblings, going without basic needs and striving to survive hand to mouth. How many times have they had to come face to face with the natural uncertainties of life? They are just young girls. What secret dreams do they have that they could never dare to utter aloud? Do they feel angry or depressed because their parents aren’t able to take care of them, or thirst for the little things that girls their age in the city have in abundance?

Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, Translated by Lillian Forsyth

Reintegration
Pals User

This is a memory I am making

There is a Pacific Links Foundation’s reintegration shelter at the northern border of Vietnam for trafficking survivors. A twenty-minute walk from the shelter will lead to a path where one can see, across the river, to China. Here, on this side of the border, the shelter girls were children, they worked in the fields with their parents, they believed the trusted family friend who said they would be paid to be dishwashers and restaurant workers and cinnamon dryers. There, on the other side of the border, they were still children when they were instead sold to be wives and prostitutes.

This is a memory I am making.

After lunch, one day, one of the Pacific Links Foundation staff members passes out the homemade yogurt she had made the night before. For most of the girls, it is the first or second time they have ever eaten yogurt. I sit squeezed between five other girls on the couch, each of us balancing our glasses on our knees. After I finish off my yogurt, I glance over to see the girl next to me dipping her spoon straight up and down into the silky yogurt. I ask her, laughing, why she’s eating in such an odd fashion, and she replies wistfully, “Because I don’t want it to be gone so quickly.” After everyone has finished up and washed their glasses, she is still licking a few drops of yogurt at a time from her spoon, relishing the sweetness.

This is a memory I am.

I spend much of my last few days at the shelter beading with the girls. We sprawl around the large conference table, loose beads scattered across the table- aqua blue and chive green and pearly white and cotton candy pink- and squint, with pursed lips, trying to stab the end of a plastic string through the tiny holes. This requires much patience, this slipping of one bead after another. We sit in a circle, and sometimes the girls sing, in Hmong or Vietnamese, their voices high and slightly off-key and haunting. Sometimes I ask them questions about their family or their villages, and they tell me about how they would play make-believe when they were younger, imagining whole meals out of mud and leaves and rocks. Sometimes, we just sit in silence, and if I look up across the table and catch a girl’s eye, smiling, she smiles widely back, and then we go back to our own beading. And in the midst of that quiet, that gentle slowing of time, there is nothing more than that moment, nothing remaining except to listen to young girls sing of love and loss, their hearts breaking in their mouths, and to bead these pearls one at a time onto a string I will carry with me always.

This is a memory.

Sitting around a circle, we share affirmations of our strengths. One of the girls remains in silence for several minutes when it comes to her turn; she can’t come up with anything positive to say about herself. Last year, she had been sold so far across the border of China that, after she escaped, she had to be flown back to Vietnam. She told me that, as she was running away from her captors, in the middle of the night, she would run close to the cliffs of the surrounding waterfalls, so that, if they found her, she could kill herself by jumping off the edge. She whispers her one positive trait to a nearby girl, but we ask her to say it aloud using her own voice. When she finally does, a barely audible, “Sometimes I try to help people,” her voice breaks, under the strain, the newness of what it means to believe that it is good in her.

This is.

A girl asks me, “Do you remember the last time you visited, one day there was a double rainbow?”

I say, “I do.”

“It was so pretty, wasn’t it?”

I agree that it was indeed. We both look out at the cloudless blue sky, her hair lit up by the sun. There is no rainbows insight, but it is still a sight to behold.

Nhu Tien Lu

GEMS
Pals User

For a bag of coffee

In the United States, a bag of name-brand coffee will cost about $12. In Ho Chi Minh City, it costs 35,000 Dong ($1.75 USD) to order a Vietnamese iced coffee in an air-conditioned upscale café, or 10,000 Dong (50 cents) to have your coffee in a disposable cup instead of from a vendor in the park.

Here, in this urban chaos of business and motorbikes, you will sometimes meet someone, either a foreigner or Vietnamese, and he will ask you what you do. In response to your saying that you work on anti-trafficking along the borders of Vietnam, he will say knowingly, “Yes, I hear so many of these poor parents sell their own children for a few dollars, or a bag of coffee or something.”

You will respond with, “Actually, from our experiences with trafficking returnees, the girls are most often tricked by acquaintances of the family, or perhaps even a relative, usually because the girls were looking for a job. The parents often don’t have enough money to send their children to school, so their children will often quit school early and try to find work to help out, which leaves them vulnerable to being tricked and sold.”

Usually, this person will nod absent-mindedly, look away, and then change the topic.

What you don’t get to say is, “What kind of parent do you think being poor makes you?”

It costs 150,000 Dong ($7.50) one-way for a seat in an 18-person van that will end up crowding in 24 people for a 9-hour bumpy ride from Ho Chi Minh to Kien Giang. On that ride, the window won’t be able to close, the door will jam and no longer open, the man perched on the child’s plastic chair next to you will keep falling asleep on your shoulder, so that you have to push him off at the same time that you are slapping the mosquitoes from your feet,  and someone behind you will become carsick several times during the trip. But once you step out of the van, the landscape stretches out around you in bright shocks of green rice paddies, trees of ripening papaya, tangled dragon fruit branches, and everywhere, the presence of water, in the brown rivers of the Mekong and the still, clear pools of farmed shrimp.

In this borderland province, for a family of 4, where the mother and father have hired hands, renting themselves out for work in other people’s fields and attempting the risky business of raising shrimp (risky, because a shrimp virus can wipe out an entire season’s earnings, as well as poison the pond for several successive seasons), they will take home about 150,000 Dong ($7.50) a month, or 5000 Dong (25 cents) a day, after their land rent is deducted. Whatever they can plant and forage for around their house, built from dirt and water-palm leaves, is what they will eat. They will occasionally splurge to buy ice.

For their two daughters to attend school, they must consider how to pay for the school fees, facility expenses (such as building maintenance), uniforms, textbooks, and school supplies on 25 cents a day. They also must factor in the loss of income if they allow their children to continue their education instead of having them sell lottery tickets or help in the fields. They must weigh their daughters’ tearful pleadings to attend school, and their quiet, desperate love for their children, desperate beyond the short-term logic of their finances. They must balance what school means as an investment in their children’s future, decades in the distance when they are sometimes uncertain what the next few months will look like from the shallow bottom of a rice bowl.

You ask her, “If our program runs out of money, and we can no longer provide a scholarship for you to attend school, do you think your parents will try to help you finish 12th grade?” She is in 8th grade and wants to be a doctor. She cries when she says this. She shares a bicycle with her 11-year old sister, biking to school for her morning session classes, and then coming home at noon so that her sister can take the bicycle to attend her afternoon session. Between the two of them, they also share 22 certificates of achievements that they can’t hang up on their walls, for fear that the rains that pour through the gaps in the water-palm leaves will ruin the papers. She answers, “Yes, if my parents are able to.”

“And what if they’re not able to?”

She looks at you, wanting to answer, wanting to please you, but nothing comes out, and tears well up in her eyes. She puts her head down and whispers, “I don’t know.”

There is a child’s love that can sound like honor and duty, that can look like quitting school and working with fingertips black from picking peppers for several cents a kilogram, that can feel like a letting go of dreams that can’t be dreamed, that can taste like a tender, bittersweet pain.

There is a parent’s love that can sound like sacrifice and responsibility, that can look like bent-over fieldwork from before sunrise to after sunset, skin dark and calloused, this caring for one’s children that can feel like a burden of lightness, a deep, unspoken longing for them to have a life that is better, gentler than your own, this painful sorrow so sharp it can taste like hope.

Along the roads back from Kien Giang, passing next to rows of farmed shrimp pools, you can see, reflected in the still waters, the deepening blue of the sky. Above and below you, there is nothing but sky.

Pacific Links Foundation scholarships cost $200 for one student’s educational expenses for a year. We currently provide scholarships for 384 at-risk girls annually, with the goal of providing scholarships to 1000 girls annually by 2014. You can help by sponsoring one or multiple scholarships to enable at-risk girls to continue attending school.

Nhu Tien Lu

Reintegration
Pals User

The stories of a girl

For the past three weeks, I’ve been living and working at Pacific Links Foundation’s reintegration shelter for trafficking survivors in northern Vietnam. There are twelve girls, ages thirteen to twenty-two, from five different minority ethnicities, currently residing there. When I boarded the flight back to Saigon, my legs were scarred with flea bites from the rural visits, my bags were heavy with miniature pineapples and northern plums, and I was weighted with stories, these girls’ stories whose wings I can feel urgently fluttering against my ribcage, trying to find their way out.


A path through stone corn to her house.

In northern Vietnam, about an hour’s drive from Lao Cai and a steep fifteen-minute walk along dense rows of stone corn and narrow ledges of rice paddies live a Hmong girl. She is thirteen, which is old enough to have worked in the fields since her first memory, old enough to be snatched off for marriage, old enough to be sold with her mother and two sisters to China.

There are details about those four months spent in China that she will have to relive and retell over and over. These are the answers that she will have to recount to the police, the immigration officials, the social workers, the researchers, and to story seekers like myself.

I was born in the year of the mouse.

In my family, I have my mom and dad, two sisters and two brothers, and a nephew we’re caring for since his mother was sold last year to China.

My uncle invited my mom and sisters on a holiday and he promised to pay for everything. So we went with him by car, and then by boat, and then again by car once we arrived in China.

I knew that we had been sold when my uncle took the money and the two men who had taken us by boat said that we could no longer go home.

I lived with my mom and younger sister for two months, then I was sold for 12,000 yuan  ($856 USD) to become the wife to a thirty-year-old man. The family cursed at me frequently in Chinese, but I could understand, even if I didn’t know all the words. They tried to force me to learn Chinese, but I would resist; I would purposefully not listen or pay attention. They told me that they couldn’t afford to pay for a wedding with a Chinese woman for their son, so they bought a Vietnamese girl instead. I went to work with them in the fields and did housework. My older sister lived nearby since she had been sold to another man in the same neighborhood, and we would call each other as often as we could and cry together.

After four months there, I escaped with my older sister and we hired a taxi to take us to the police station, lying to the driver that we had to fill out some paperwork there because we were afraid he would bring us back to our husbands if he knew we were running away. We spent a total of two days at the border police station, two weeks at the Vietnam migration shelter, and then we were home for 4 days before we arrived at the Pacific Links reintegration shelter.

Then there are the details that she is not asked about, those memories that don’t make it into the notebooks of policemen or policy research interviewers.

I have fond memories of New Year’s day when my dad would celebrate by buying a few cans of soda to place on the altar, and after the spirits had drunk, we could bring them down and drink them.

She washes chopsticks in preparation for lunch during our visit, her white plastic shoes in the background.

My parents bought my first pair of shoes for school, little plastic ones that cost 5000 Dong (25 cents US) and I’d walk barefoot to school, then put the shoes on, and then after school, I’d walk back home barefoot. I was so afraid of wearing down those shoes.

I had a baby chick when I was young, but one day it was hopping around the house, crying -chirp chirp chirp- and my sister, who was sweeping the dirt floor, became irritated at the noise, and so she brushed it out into the field and it died. It was so small. I cried and cried.

When I was supposed to be tending to the water buffalos after school, if my parents weren’t around, I would shape the damp red earth into figurines, and pretend that my clay was a princess who lived in a castle, and I could do this for hours -meanwhile having to slap away the fleas that landed thick and dark on my legs- and if my sisters were with me, then my princess could go visit their princess in their castle.

In China, the family would turn off the television at 11 pm, and I would go upstairs to my bed and sit there, awake, still, until 3 or 4 in the morning. I would think about how to escape. I would think about killing myself. Sometimes I just thought. I would ask my sister, when life and death are the same misery, then what’s the difference? But I once overheard the family talking about a dumb girl who escaped back to Vietnam, and I thought if she’s a stupid girl and she managed to run away, then how ridiculous would it be if I couldn’t? And after that, I stopped thinking about suicide and only thought of how to escape.

She is now planning on finishing her schooling while at the shelter. When asked what she wants to study, she says, anything. Everything. She is so clever that you believe her, you think everything is truly possible for her if she should want it. Her laughter is open, wide, infectiously bright, so deep that you can’t imagine her sadness.

She says: “I dream of one day owning a house with two stories. Of having a lot of money so I can buy whatever I want. Of going swimming in the ocean.”

Anything else?

She looks down, and then she says, softly: “I dream that one day I’ll forget.”

And then she begins to cry, this vibrant, shining girl who has, for the first time since you’ve met her, stopped smiling. You wrap her in a hug and you hold her for several minutes while she cries, although you can’t tell who’s crying harder.

And in a while, she’ll dry her eyes and you’ll say something to make her smile, and when she does, her wide, deep laugh bright as a morning in the room, you’ll see how her laughter is fierce with courage and resistance and light.

But for now, you let her cry, her thin shoulders against your arms.

There is a thirteen-year-old Hmong girl you now know, and whose story you will tell to others, who laughs all the time, who cried over baby chicks and refused to learn Chinese, and who dreams of one-day forgetting.

Nhu Tien Lu

News
Pals User

Not famous, but heroes nonetheless: reflections on the 2011 trafficking in persons report

On June 27, the U.S. Department of State released the 2011 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, which assesses the counter-human trafficking efforts of 184 countries and provides recommendations for improvement. Although it can’t fully investigate the complicated nature of the issue in each country and is, after all, written with the U.S.’s diplomatic policies in mind, this annual report is one of the main sources of standardized information about trafficking in the world.

Vietnam was listed as “Tier 2 – Watchlist” again this year. The Vietnam section of the report pointed primarily to Vietnam’s labor trafficking problem and encouraged Vietnam to make information and protections more readily available for private and state-run labor export companies. I was frustrated by the shortage of information about sex trafficking, as this is still a pressing issue in the regions where Pacific Links Foundation works, and it is inextricably linked to the rise in labor export from Vietnam.

One of the victim stories from the TIP report highlighted the link between labor trafficking and sex trafficking that is often observed in Vietnam:

“Olga, 23, came to Dubai from Moldova on a visitor visa after hearing about a job opportunity there. A Russian woman and an Indian man picked her up at the airport when she arrived. They took her to their apartment and told her she would instead be prostituted. When she refused, they beat her and threatened to kill her and bury her in the desert. They threatened to harm her if she did not pay them back for her travel expenses, and then sent Olga to a local hotel to meet customers and collect money from them.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton spoke at the White House on the day the report was released, reiterating some of the key points and talking about her own experience visiting a shelter for young trafficking victims in Cambodia.

This year’s report also contained a section that I’d never noticed in prior years, entitled “TIP Heroes.” Clinton mentioned this section of the report in the speech, stating:

“Stories like these and the others you will hear about our TIP heroes give us hope, because they inspire us, but also tell us very practically what we can do to make a difference. And the story of all the victims really is one that should motivate all of us. And when we hear the stories of the TIP heroes, we know that it’s not hopeless, we know that it is not overwhelming, we know that person by person, we can make a difference.”

The Secretary’s words made me curious about these TIP Heroes and so I navigated over to that section of the website. As I read through these heroes’ stories – people working on trafficking from Bosnia, to Nepal, to Finland, in areas including prosecution, shelter services, and community building – I felt a simultaneous sense of “So what?” and “Wow.” How could these two thoughts occur simultaneously? Well, because as I read through the stories of these heroes, I felt as if reflections of the Pacific Links Foundation’s counter-trafficking initiatives were staring out of the page in front of me.

The TIP Heroes showcased in the report are people who have trained law enforcement officials to recognize trafficking at the borders, set up programs to counter trafficking in their communities, and established shelters for victims where there were previously no services. Pacific Links has done all of these things and more. Pacific Links Foundation has provided over 700 scholarships for at-risk girls; reintegration services to more than 80 young women at its shelters at the northern and southern borders or in their communities; and awareness-raising programs for over 5000 local school teachers, women’s groups, public officials, parents, and community members. And Pacific Links Foundation does all of this with only two full-time program staff members, one accountant, two resident coordinators at the shelters, and a handful of unpaid full- and part-time volunteers, in both Vietnam and the U.S., including the organization’s president.

As I read the TIP report stories, I felt a sense of admiration for what Pacific Links Foundation has been able to accomplish over the past six years. It’s amazing to be able to work for an organization that is full of everyday heroes who dedicate so much of their passion to this cause and but have yet to receive such formal recognition.

Lillian Forsyth