Saved from Slavery... by a Sandwich Cart

This is a recent blog post taken from the blog of Viva, the amazing children at risk charity Rob and I are working for in Hong Kong.

Veata’s family live in a village outside Phnom Penh. She’s 15 now, but she’s been working since she was 11. Veata, her mother, and her siblings work as trash collectors to earn money – three siblings work collecting trash while the other three attend school, and then they swap. Veata’s father is a construction worker.

A few years ago, Veata’s mother enrolled her in the Phnom Penh network’s ‘Get Ready’ programme, a project that keeps girls out of brothels by helping them develop skills that will help them get work. That way girls are educated but are still available to help their families earn money –a balance that is really necessary in poor Cambodian villages and families. (For those of you who don’t know, the network in Phnom Penh, called Chab Dai, is a group of projects that Viva helped bring together and continues to support, to prevent girls from being sold into sexual slavery in Cambodia.)

The staff of the network could see that Veata was a good student and a quick learner. She graduated from the Get Ready programme and was encouraged to continue with ‘Bright Girls’, through which she was given an allowance so she could take advanced English lessons. Veata spent two years in the ‘Bright Girls’ programme and became a skilled seamstress and tailor – even earning money above her allowance from the sales of her clothes!

Then the effects of the global financial crisis swept through Cambodia, and Veata’s father found his construction assignments growing fewer and farther between. Even with Veata’s sales and allowance and the hard work of her family collecting trash, there wasn’t enough money to cover the cost of living. They became prime targets for traffickers, who prey on families in financial straits.

A man approached Veata’s parents with an arrangement for her that could relieve them of the poverty that threatened: he said Veata would make a good candidate for a ‘second wife’. A wealthy Asian businessman was going to be spending time in Phnom Penh on business regularly through the year, and was looking for a young live-in mistress. The man offered Veata’s parents £125 up front, with monthly payments of £75 to follow. Although they hated the idea of parting with their daughter in this way, they were becoming desperate - that money could prevent the family from going hungry and possibly losing their home.

Veata went to one of the teachers from the Bright Girl programme for help. Because of the love and care the staff at Bright Girl had shown her, she knew she could trust them with this huge problem. She was immediately taken in to the weekly boarding programme supported by the network to be kept safe from the trafficker, while the network's social workers talked about alternatives with Veata’s family. They were able to arrange a £50 microbusiness loan for the family to set up a sandwich cart. This wasn’t as much as the trafficker was offering, but Veata’s parents were willing to take any option that would keep their daughter from becoming a ‘second wife’.

Veata stayed in the care of the network boarding programme until her family’s sandwich business was set up and she could safely return home. Within four months, she’d even paid off the microloan using her monthly allowance and the income from her sewing business!

Working together, we’ve seen Veata grow from a trash collector in tattered clothes, exposed to the dangers of child sexual exploitation, to a talented seamstress who can help support her family and earns more than most factory workers in Cambodia. And even better than that, her younger sisters are now safe from the danger posed by traffickers, as the microloan from the network has lifted their family out of poverty and created a business for all of them to benefit from.

If you enjoyed this post, do check out Viva's blog for other encouraging stories, and you may also enjoy Cambodia II: Rehab House and For the Love of Cupcakes.

So what do you do?

This article was pitched as part of a series for a paper in Singapore but it was dropped (sob!) as the paper didn't want to encourage a trend for corporate exodus (!!!)

Thought I should post it here nonetheless for those who haven't got bored of reading about escaping the corporate life :)

So what do you do?

I dreaded that question 3 years ago but it was impossible to avoid being asked precisely that at dinner parties.

In November 2007 I had taken the leap and left my glamorous job as a corporate lawyer in London to instead pursue an alternative career in the charity sector. To my surprise the transition left me shaken inside and I found many things difficult, including how to introduce myself to new acquaintances. I felt embarrassed admitting that I was in transit to an unknown new world, despite the frequent response of admiration (which sometimes was accompanied by bewilderment). The temptation was always there to drop in a line or two about how I used to work for a top law firm.

Equally challenging was the moment when everyone exchanged sleek-looking business cards and I would stand there feeling self-conscious. When my turn came I would apologise that I didn’t have a card, and joke that I should have prepared a homemade one. Perhaps my card would read: “Searching for a Job in International Development Relating to Children, Ideally if Previous Legal Skills can be Used”? And maybe “Ex Corporate Lawyer” should feature at the front, underlined, in case people didn’t think much of the convoluted title?

Having grown up in Singapore in my teens and succeeding all my life in the traditional sense (straight A student, Dean’s list in law school, scholarship to Oxford, high flying first job), I found it extremely hard to actually believe that I as a person was not defined by the parameters of conventional success. For months after I exited the revolving glass doors of Allen & Overy, I struggled not to view myself through the coloured lens by which I used to pigeonhole others: their jobs, their “proven” abilities; their financial status. I was also shocked to discover that I had those biases ingrained in me.

And there were other difficult aspects of the transition to deal with. All of a sudden, I found myself having to check my bank account balance and actually do some budgeting - such was the degree of my previous recklessness with my finances that I never knew how much money I had at any one point! Neither was I aware of the cost of, say, a red pepper in the supermarket, or a starter at a restaurant, as I threw things into my shopping trolley, or ordered from the menu without paying much attention to the numbers. I thought that was normal.

Socially, it wasn’t easy either. When going out with friends who also had lucrative jobs, it became necessary to have awkward conversations about how to split the bill. I had to muster all I had to fight the feeling of “losing face”. Also, I couldn’t attend the dinner at my best friend’s birthday bash at a posh restaurant but could only manage to join the party for a drink afterwards. For a natural people pleaser (with a delicate self esteem), all this proved to be very difficult, but these situations forced me to examine some of the deep seated attitudes in me and the motives behind what I used to do.

Looking back, it was a tough period of time, and writing about it has even depressed me slightly, but if you asked me if I regretted my decision at all, the answer would be an irrevocable no. There is no way I would exchange now (and the excitement of what is to come) for anything from my previous life.