Love146

I recently came across this moving video, about the story of a girl called Diana who had endured unspeakable trauma but has now found real hope and strength for the future.

Love146 is part of the network which Viva partners with in Cambodia, where scores of children are victims of trafficking and exploitation.

Diana's Love Story from LOVE146 on Vimeo.

To find out more about the amazing work of Love146, check out www.love146.org.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Cambodia II: Rehab House, For the Love of Cupcakes.

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.

Cambodia II: Rehab's House

This blog post is part of a series where I'll be sharing about what we've seen and experienced in terms of the anti human trafficking work in Cambodia.

Another project just outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which really moved us was Rehab's House.

Until several years ago, Rehab's House used to be a brothel where scores of under 18 girls were kept to service the sexual needs of customers. Men typically paid US$10 to 20 to sleep with a girl if she wasn’t a virgin. In a culture where (at least for some sections of society) sleeping with a virgin is believed to bring good luck or, on the extreme end, able to purge one’s HIV, a virgin at this brothel was priced at US$300 and her price can go up to $700 if she was pretty.

I say her “price”, but she would not have received a single penny of what was paid as all the money went to the brothel owners.

At the brothel, children were kept in individual “rooms” (which was no more than a 5 feet x 7 feet cell) with a wooden bed where the sexual acts would be performed. On the wall outside each room was painted, in red, a number. The children were known as the numbers outside their rooms. Two rows of rooms ran parallel to each other, with a tiny corridor in the middle. The children were not allowed to go out of their rooms except for using the toilet etc, and if they tried to escape they would suffer grave punishment, and in the few cases of children who tried to run away they were brought back by gangsters in the vicinity who were connected with the brothel.

In 2002, International Justice Mission, working with the local police, raided the brothel, rescuing all the children who had been held in captivity, and went on to persecute the perpetrators. The children, who finally saw the light of day after living in what could only be described as hell, were then placed in an aftercare shelter operated by Agape (who also runs Rehab's House), where they could be counseled, cared for and educated so that they might have another chance at life.

The building where the brothel used to operate was subsequently majorly restructured, with the cold, dingy cells demolished (except for Room no. 9), and turned into a community centre providing supplementary schooling to children, vocational training (sewing lessons!) to women and girls, and healthcare to all in the community. The women and girls taking the sewing lessons are now able to make pillowcases as a livelihood to provide for themselves and their families. Livelihood is an extremely important key to preventing trafficking in the first place, as many who are poor and desperate to survive are often extremely vulnerable to traffickers coming along to entice/trick/persuade them into so-called “employment opportunities”.

The community where Rehab's House is located is not without lingering problems – 70% of its inhabitants are Vietnamese (and hence stateless and illegal, according to the Cambodian government, despite the fact that they have lived in the country for many years and their children were born in Cambodia; they are particularly at risk as the state does not protect them at all), most people living there are still very poor and uneducated, gangs still operate in the area and pedophiles still travel from Phnom Penh daily to transact with children.

Walking through the streets and seeing people not having or doing much, it’s tempting to get all despondent about the state of things in this community. But we’re reminded again of the progress that has been already made as a result of the immense hard work by amazing organisations such as IJM and Agape, and that widespread, long lasting change always takes time.

As we were leaving those dusty roads that evening, through the back window of the window I looked at Rehab's House again, painted in orange and yellow, and the women working on their sewing projects. What used to be a dungeon where cries of children were muffled, Rehab's House is now a lighthouse in its community, giving hope and a future to many.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Human Trafficking or For the Love of Cupcakes.

For the Love of Cupcakes

Have you ever thought of how cupcakes could help victims of sexual trafficking?

No, I'm not talking about cupcakes sold in a booth in some market somewhere to raise funds for a charity that works to combat the problem of sexual trafficking - though that's awesome in itself.

Two weeks ago, Rob and I visited several projects in Phnom Penh, the capital of the Kingdom of Cambodia.

One of these projects is called Bloom Cafe, a cafe which has been set up to help girls and women who have been previously trafficked into the sex trade. Bloom Cafe helps them by training them to bake and make cupcakes (and other kinds of cakes, all ridiculously beautifully decorated) and sell them at the cafe.

We had heard about Bloom Cafe the whole week when we were in Phnom Penh, and on the penultimate day we decided to swing by quickly to have a cup of tea and some impossible-to-eat-because-it-is-so-beautiful type of cupcakes!

The cafe has a lovely, relaxed atmosphere, and scattered around the ground floor are plush sofa seats, all colour-coordinated with matching cushions, and some wooden tables sitting bigger parties.

There are also three glass cupboards filled with displays of decorated cakes - in the form of a stylish luggage with a tag for Paris, a swish lady handbag, Noah's ark (complete with pai

rs of animals), and about 25 other designs. They were so good even Rob was impressed!

(We couldn't take any pictures of the decorated cakes so you'll have to go there yourself to check them out!)

Having never spoken to anyone who's been through unimaginable trauma, I was a bit unsure what to expect when I ordered a set of three cupcakes (and had huge difficulties choosing which three out of the 20+ designs), a pot of Fairtrade Chai tea and a cup of Fairtrade cappuccino. The ladies behind the counter were friendly and professional, and were gracious and smiling as I couldn't stop expressing my wonder and admiration at their work.

Trafficking is a complex issue. One thing which we have learned from our time in Phnom Penh is that huge efforts need to be made in different aspects of anti trafficking work. For example, whilst rescuing trafficked girls and women from brothels is critical in protecting them, they also need to be given appropriate care and counselling afterwards in order to have a chance of being healed or at least coming to terms with the trauma and pain which they have suffered. But it does not stop there - after an appropriate time of aftercare, these girls and women need to have alternative means of making a living, as otherwise, driven by poverty and lack of options, they may fall prey to trafficking and enter that world again.

So Bloom Cafe (and many others) is providing a great form of training and livelihood which gives real, long lasting hope to many who have just emerged from a dark world of unspeakable horror and pain.

In the next few posts I will write more about what we experienced in Phnom Penh, the different kinds of amazing projects that are going on and what we can all do to help combat the evil of human trafficking.

Off to Phnom Penh

I'm really excited about our trip to Cambodia tomorrow (despite the ungodly departure hour - budget airline hours).

We're going to be visiting several local projects run by members of the Chab Dai Coalition network which is the partnering network of Viva in Cambodia.

Chab Dai (literally “joining hands” in Khmer) aims to bring an end to trafficking and sexual exploitation through coalition building, community prevention, advocacy and research. There are currently 40 members in the coalition.

During the next week we will be learning first-hand from project workers on the ground about the issues of and solutions for trafficking and sexual exploitation in Cambodia.

For the past few months we have been hearing many good things about Chab Dai from friends and contacts outside Viva, so we're really looking forward to seeing their excellent work in one of the most hardcore, difficult fields in international development.

I hope to write about some of the projects next week.

Human Trafficking

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

- Edmund Burke

Last week during a bumpy three-hour drive to a waterfall with some visitors from Germany I listened to an mp3 of a talk which Gary Haugen gave at Holy Trinity Brompton on human trafficking. Gary Haugen, a DC lawyer, is an excellent speaker and his talk brought home to me again the reality of this problem in today’s world. He is the head of International Justice Mission, a Christian organisation dedicated to the rescue of people who have been oppressed or unjustly treated, including those who have been trafficked, and the prosecution of the perpetrators, so that justice may be realised and injustice stopped.

You can listen to the talk HERE.

It’s been said many times before but I still get shocked when I hear that there are more people held in slavery now than more than 200 years ago, before the abolition of the slave trade.

Over lunch, we asked Harald, the German pastor who started CFA some 18 years ago, about the problem of human trafficking in Cebu. Having worked in Cebu for almost two decades, he said the city is actually more dangerous than Manila in terms of children being tricked into being trafficked. He told us the story of one of the girls at CFA. Her family was very poor and lived in one of the feeding areas where CFA visited (and still visits). One day her mother announced, with pride, to one of the CFA staff who was visiting the area, that her daughter had been given a job in Manila. The staff’s suspicions were confirmed as it transpired after much probing that the mother had been persuaded by a stranger to let her daughter go to Manila to work, and in return she would be given some money. In CFA’s experience, instead of the promised new life, the girl would most likely be sold into a brothel. The mother did not intend to sell her daughter into the sex trade, but was unable to support her daughter along with the her many other children. Thankfully the girl was taken into CFA’s care before she left for Manila and she is now a smiling teenager who is petrified of being tickled!

I think the biggest problem that many of us face when it comes to thinking about these things isn’t apathy, but paralysis by despair. We feel overwhelmed by the statistics, dragged down by the facts and helpless because we think the problem is too vast or we don’t know where to begin.

Sometimes I still feel this way, but I’m reminded once and again that:

- if everyone does something, it will count eventually!

- ultimately, it’s a choice that we make, whether we choose to live life as if such things do not happen, or we choose to do what we can to help stop injustice.

So what can we actually do?

Well, I’m not an expert but I think there are at least a few things for starters:

1. We can educate ourselves more about such issues so we can decide what best we can do, and also to tell others about the issues. Here are some good sites - UN Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking, Stop the Traffik

2. Stop the Traffik has a campaign where people are encouraged to only buy trafficking-free chocolate (on top of fair trade) and to urge chocolate producers to ensure that the cocoa they use does not involve exploitation of trafficked labour. And you can even hold your own traffick-free chocolate fondue party! See Stop the Traffik for more information.

3. Support organisations such as STT and IJM in their efforts to combat trafficking and other acts of injustice – by telling others about them and by giving financially.

4. If you’re a Christian, I would say PRAY! Pray for God to intervene to bring justice and restored lives out of these places of darkness and despair. Personally, I found that it was as I began praying, I felt more strength to get more involved in points 1-3 above too.