Sep 16, 2022 – Mo* is from the Lai Chau Province of Vietnam. When she was just 13 years old, she and her older sister were tricked into believing that they were being offered work in China. Instead, they were trafficked and sold into slavery.
It was a dark, scary time. I didn’t feel human. I was falling into a deep hole, not able to get out.
Still a child, she was forced to marry a man aged 20 who threatened to break her legs if she tried to run away. The family never gave her money to support herself. She started learning Chinese and persuaded the family to allow her to work in a backpack production factory.
With the little money she was earning, Mo bought a mobile phone and called the Chinese police. Officers escorted her to the Vietnamese Embassy, who helped her return home.
Mo turned to the ‘Compassion House’ in Lao Cai, a safe house project run by the Pacific Links Foundation.
The Compassion House project is funded by the UN Voluntary Trust Fund on Contemporary Forms of Slavery. The Fund, which is managed by UN Human Rights, helps hundreds of thousands of people who remain enslaved today by awarding grants to organizations that provide direct relief to victims on the ground.
