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It wasn't always this way, things were good. I had a family who loved me. My mom she tried so hard to give us everything we needed. Not just food but enough to go to school. We lived in a hill tribe, with my grandmother and sister. My dad left along time ago.
My grandmother is faithful, every day she climbs the mountain to the temple to pay tribute to our Gods. When she prays she takes a can of sticks and shakes them until one falls out and she writes down the number written on it. She prays for prosperity and money to be able to provide for us. When she has all the numbers she needs she walks to the bottom of the temple to the people carrying the lottery cards. She pays them all the money she has, with the assurance that our God has answered our prayer for prosperity and given her the numbers to win the money we need. I never see our God answer, he sits cast in gold staring down at us as we pray, and the money never comes. Each time we lose more then what we have been promised, until we can't lose anymore. We stopped surviving and we can't afford to eat, all of our money has gone to wasted promises.
Thats when the man came. He came to our village promising a new life for us girls. I was too young, but my sister was just right. He talked of education, and a life that would get her out of the rice fields and allow her to provide for us. It sounded so nice to leave this place, to live in the city, to learn. I wanted to go but my mother said no. She hesitated letting my sister go but she had no other choice. He promised money for her being able to leave with the man, and my mom ached for her to have a better life. We had never seen him before but his words sounded full of promise and hope. My sister was 14 when this man paid my mom and took her to the city to learn. We never heard from her again though. No more money came, and no word of where she was or what she was doing. We stopped talking about her, it's like she never existed.
We still struggled to survive, now we were one less person to work for the family and we didn't know how we were going to make it. Then came another man, this one for my mother. He saw her working in the fields and thought she would make a good wife. He never really liked me much. I stayed out of his way when he was around. It got harder when they got married, but I kept my distance and made sure I did everything I was supposed to. Then came the day my mother rushed me off to school. When I finished and walked home, I opened the door and no one was there. All of our stuff was gone. The house was empty and my mother was no where to be found. I sat on the floor and waited for days. No one ever came for me. My mother was gone, and she was not coming back.
I was one less mouth for him to feed, it was his choice as the husband to make. He never really liked me much. Now I wander the streets, looking for anything to sustain me. I feel their stares as I pass and hear their hisses at me to leave them alone. I'm not their child, and they will not help me find a solution. I am all alone. I bare my families shame and pray that one day this all ends. That one day I will lay engulfed in the grass again.
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This isn't one girls story, it's the compilation of girls stories I heard time and time again in Thailand when I was there. Girls whose families had been promised they would be given an education in the city, only to have them forced into the sex industry without their consent. Simply because the education was not there to let the families know the actual outcome.
Or two incredibly precious little girls that I lived with who each at the age of three were abandoned by their families. One day they were there and the next they were gone, leaving the girls to fend for themselves. Which for one of the girls from the age of 3-5 she survived completely on her own. All because the mother had married a man who decided he no longer wanted to take care of his wife's children and so they move while the children were gone, never to be seen again. It is more common practice then I ever knew, and in fact was the story of many of the older girls I had met as well. Leaving each of them with feelings of deep rejection. Not to mention leaving them open to a high risk of being exploited for sex trafficking. The less ties they have, the easier it is to exploit them.
I remember the first time I heard about the lottery vendors at each temple we went to. I had seen the people praying while shaking a can but I never understood what it was, and I had seen countless lottery vendors carrying crates of tickets around but I never imagined the connection between the two. It is a practice that happens every single day and is often a source of people losing their money which once again leads them to have a higher instance of selling their children in to sex trafficking with or without realizing they are doing so.
It's easy to look at these stories and say what a messed up country this is, but when you see the whole picture you also see that 65% of the men who come through the Bangkok airport are their to participate in sex trafficking. Just thinking of the statistics is mind boggling and easy to dismiss as soon as you hear it, until you start realizing it's not just a statistic but is in fact a reality. Standing in the Bangkok airport I remember knowing the statistic, knowing the facts and yet not being able to wrap my mind around it. Then it hit way to close to home, and this statistic I had come across half way across the world began to invade my life in america.
I had never even realized the implications of sex trafficking or sex tourism, growing up. It's either far distance or just to huge to even make personal enough to fit into my small world sized bubble. Once I walked into the reality of a world and way of life I could never erase from my mind, I began to piece together all of the times I had heard something about it and my reactions to it then.
I remembered a teacher my freshman year of high school who just happened to be my tennis coach and traveled to asia often who would talk about friends he had who would go their just to buy a girl before coming home to their wives. Constant joking about it, to a room full of 13-14 year olds. I remembered being in the red light district in Amsterdam doing a walk through on my class trip when I was 12, and seeing men walk in and out of girls booths everywhere I looked. I remembered being in Berlin when I was 20, on a small strip of street and feeling not quite right about my surroundings only to see the street lined with women trying to take anyone home for the night, just for a couple of bucks.
I was surrounded by it my whole life, but I never saw it. Then suddenly there was nothing I could do to un-see it. It started popping up when I least expected it. Right after I got back from the race I had dinner with a friend who brought their friend I had never met. They asked me questions about my favorite country and I responded as usual with Thailand. The person then proceeded tell me how wonderful Thailand was and how he had been there and how you can get the best girls there, and gave a run down of what he liked in his girls, even mentioning young girls. I wanted to scream, vomit, cry. Everything in me welled up, all the pain I had seen in the girls eyes, and all their stories came flooding back. It was too much for me to handle so I left.
Then more recently an older man that used to work with my dad was asking me about where my next adventure would be to and I said that I hoped to have some sort of connection to Thailand. Which immediately launched him into stories of men he worked with at the department who took regular trips to Thailand to buy girls for days and weeks at a time. How they would lie to their wives and spend all their money on women. He made a joke about it and called the guys skeezeballs, right before asking me why I wanted to go their. This time I didn't crumble, I looked him straight in the eyes and told him I want to help prevent sex trafficking and sex tourism. To say the look on his face became very somber would be an understatement.
The reality is that it happens, all around us everyday. It's not just a statistic, it's peoples lives that are affected. Not just in Thailand, but here in Colorado. In Atlanta where it's one of the biggest hubs for trafficking women through. My heart beat is to see that change, to see lives affected for the better. To see more prevention in place to stop it from happening in the first place. To be a piece in someones life puzzle that diverts them in a different direction and gives them a hope they wouldn't have otherwise. My heart beat is to start making a difference one person at a time. To love people one person at a time. So I am not standing idly by, I am taking steps towards a way to make this a reality. My life is meant to be poured out...
Stay tuned to find out how I am taking steps to do just that, it's pretty exciting.
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