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
