Goodbye COSA (for now!)

Alright, I have to accept the inevitable; after eight hectic, rollercoaster, wonderful months, I’m now in my last few days of working at COSA. A lot has changed in that time, and I think it’s fitting in my last week to go all the way back to my first week, when we intervened in the trafficking of twenty two children. When we first came across them, they were quiet, reserved and highly suspicious of us. Eight months later, most of the boys and three of the girls are going to a boarding school in Chiang Rai; the rest are living in one of the villages we work with, attending school and living with foster families. On our regular visits to the village, they come up to greet us, no longer suspicious but friendly and open. They have all become very close, and form a solid support network for each other. In only a short time, they have gone from being vulnerable, scared children to smiling, happy kids who can look forward to a better future.

It’s not just individuals who have changed; COSA itself has seen a lot of development over the past while. Eight months ago, we had twelve girls living at Baan Yuu Suk and were working with a couple of villages on prevention. Now, we have eighteen girls living at the shelter, and are busy building another house to meet the increased numbers. We have also reached out to more villages, spreading the message of education as an alternative to trafficking and carrying out the MOSAIC medical trip, which has seen great success in its first few months. There is now a fostering system in place to meet the demand of all the new children that we can’t take in ourselves. This next year will only see more of this growth, with a forthcoming photography expedition, more MOSAIC trips and potential collaboration with other organisations and institutions. The Baan Yuu Suk girls have all seen big changes in their lives too, many moving up from middle school to high school, some in their last year. Their English has come on so well, and a lot of them seem to have really grown up in the past few months; they’re still giggly teenagers, but they’ve also become more confident and not afraid to chase their goals. It’s exciting to think about the future and what it will hold for them all, especially those who are due to leave school soon. The first COSA graduates!

Now, at the very beginning of this blog I said if I ever spouted on about myself too much, you would have license to slap me. I think I’ve been pretty good up til now, so I’m allowing myself one final paragraph of self-indulgence. I have noticed a lot of changes in the past eight months, not least in myself. When I first arrived I had only vague ideas of what career path I wanted to take, and knew very little about the trade in humans, how widespread it is, who the traffickers are, and why it happens. Since working at COSA I’ve learned so much, not only about these issues, but also about the importance of addressing the root causes of a social problem in order to have any hope of alleviating it, as well as the differences in cultures and how central these are to approaching such problems. I’ve also learned about the depth of human strength and resilience; some of our girls have been in unspeakable situations, yet they’ve managed to come out the other side smiling. I’m very grateful to COSA for teaching me all these things, and helping to focus my path in life; I am now hoping to do a Master’s in development in the next couple of years. It’s all down to the fact that this organisation, though small, is one of those places that you know is actually making a difference, and you want to continue to be a part of it even when you’re far away. I’m leaving here with some great work experience, wonderful new friends, and eighteen new little sisters. I hope I’ll continue to be a part of the COSA family even from afar, and that its grassroots level approach will be adopted by more and more organisations; because only then will we stand a chance of truly putting an end to trafficking. 

Holiday fun

I seem to start almost every post with excuses for not having written anything in ages; this time, I don’t really have a good one for April, which was, I shall be honest, a bit of a skive workwise. The summer holidays began at the end of March, and for the first time ever, every single one of the girls went home to their families for three weeks. It was tea-picking season, so the girls were happy to help out their families and get a bit of home life back in the hilltribe villages that they come from. So this meant that a large part of our work at the shelter was suddenly gone! It was a very quiet few weeks, and I’ll admit that not hearing ‘I want to play gaaaame!’ every five minutes was a welcome change at first.  Still, it was very weird not having them around after a while, and we started to miss them a lot. Luckily there was plenty of distraction in the form of fun; us workers took a three day trip to Mae Hong Son, a pretty, hilly area near the Burmese border. We spent a great few days of waterfall diving, swimming in rivers and eating lots before coming home. A week later was Songkran, which is no doubt THE best holiday ever- beats Christmas, Easter and birthdays all rolled into one. Originally a religious festival celebrating Buddhist New Year, it has somehow over the years mutated into a massive, three day long nation-wide water fight. No-one, and I mean no-one, is safe. We spent three days being soaked to the skin and having the time of our lives. You haven’t lived until you’ve poured a bucket of ice-water over some creepy old white guy’s head in front of his young Thai ‘girlfriend’….

I had barely recovered from Songkran (in fact I was still having stomach twinges from accidentally swallowing some of the lovely putrid canal water flung in my face) when my parents arrived for a couple of weeks, and I was whisked away for a week of spoiling and lounging by fancy hotel pools. I had almost forgotten what a comfortable bed feels like, so it felt like a very luxurious few days for me.

So it was right back down to earth when I returned to a full house a couple of weeks ago. The girls had all returned safe and well and happy to be back. We were concerned that we would have trouble getting one of our youngest, 11 year old Aying, back after the holidays, as she had been telling us that her father wanted her to come home for good after the school year ended to look after her younger siblings. There was no trouble though, and it was clear that she was very happy to be back; the girls all realize that they have far better opportunities here than they do at home. We also have six new arrivals; a couple have been on the wait list and have been due to come in for a while now. Three were last-minute arrivals who we were made aware of by Charoen, the head of the main village that we work with. They had all spent time in a brothel last year, and their mothers' whereabouts are unknown. Their fathers, unable to support them, know of COSA through their community and were keen to have the girls come and live at Baan Yuu Suk rather than have them go into sex work again. Given their background, we were concerned as to how they would fit in, but they have adjusted remarkably well, and after a few days of shyness are now getting on very well with the other girls (many of whom come from the same village as them). The youngest, only eleven, is still quite quiet and missing home a lot; she is very intelligent and, unsurprisingly considering her history, seems a lot older than she is. We’re keeping a close eye on her at the moment and hoping that her homesickness passes.

This means that we’re now at full capacity at the shelter here. Luckily the fostering system that I mentioned in my last post has been going well, and we have a large number of children living with trusted families in one of the hilltribe communities. On our last MOSAIC trip, which I missed as my parents were here, COSA approached a new village with the intent to expand our prevention work in the area. The difference between them and the villages we work with is marked; it is a very small village, with virtually no teenagers living there (guess where they are?). They have never educated their children, and were very distrustful of COSA’s offers to sponsor the children to go to a local school, for the simple reason that they have never educated their kids, so why start now? This response is only to be expected, given that they have led the same way of life for decades; we left it to the heads of the villages we work with to try and persuade them that education is a better and more long-lasting alternative to trafficking and exploitation. As locals who have benefited from our assistance, it’s far more beneficial for these men to persuade the village than us, a bunch of foreigners who barely speak the language. This way, it’s the community themselves helping to solve the problem rather than a group of outsiders. The trust-building process is a slow one, but worth taking time over. We will continue to visit the village on our trips up to the community, and in time they will hopefully come round to sending their young ones to school.

And speaking of school, next week sees the end of the summer holidays for the girls; also, sadly the beginning of the end of my time here! I’m stunned to discover that after eight months, time’s played a nasty trick on me and I’ve suddenly got only a couple of weeks left. It’s not quite sunk in yet, and I don’t think it will until I’m on the plane. I’ll leave my emotional goodbye until my next (last?) post – it’s not procrastination, it’s self-preservation. With maybe a hint of denial.

The World Wide Trafficking Web

So far I’ve only talked about internal trafficking trends within Thailand; however, this is just one aspect to the country’s trade in people, as it’s part of a huge international trafficking network involving pretty much every country on the globe. Here’s a (very) brief run-down of Thailand’s place within that network:

Countries are generally divided into three basic categories when talking about trafficking trends; these are sending, transit and receiving.  The sending countries export people to the receiving countries, and tend to be poorer, like Burma, Nepal and Bangladesh. The receiving countries are generally wealthier nations like Japan and Australia. In the middle are the transit countries, acting as a route between the senders and receivers. Some countries fit into two or more of these categories, like Thailand, which is all three, making it a huge trafficking hub within this network. The border between Burma and Thailand is especially porous, and has a constant stream of people passing back and forth between the two. Whole families are regularly brought over into Thailand illegally and sold into sex work or hard labour. You might think that bringing illegal immigrants over would discourage traffickers; however, it provides a handy loophole in a lot of cases; in Thailand, the legal age to have sex is 18. If a Thai girl was found to be an underage sex worker, she could get taken in by government welfare; however, if this girl happens to be an illegal immigrant, she will just get sent back across the border, where the whole cycle will begin again. Due to the lax security between the two countries, border towns are a prime place for ‘sex tourism’, where men both Western and Asian get taken over to Burma in groups to have sex with underage girls. This is so widespread that even my boss was offered a ‘young girl’ by a cigarette vendor when we were last across renewing my visa; the fact that I was there didn’t faze this guy at all. 

So COSA’s prevention work within northern Thailand does not just deal with those children who have been trafficked internally; we also sometimes come across children who have been victims of international trafficking. One of these is Pang, a fifteen year-old Burmese girl. Mickey first heard about her when making a regular border run to renew visas; he bumped into a young woman who he had helped out of sex work when she was younger. She told him about Pang, then thirteen, who had been brought over from Burma along with her mother and siblings (there is a big trend for single mothers and their children to be trafficked together, as they apparently provide ‘better insurance’, ie; are more vulnerable and less likely to run away; lovely). Pang went to work in a bar run by an Englishman who regularly takes sex tourists over to Burma; as you can imagine, her ‘kitchen job’ didn’t remain that, and she, along with two other girls her age, was made to sleep with the bar customers. Mickey arranged for these three girls to be taken out of the bar, and set up support and schooling for them. I asked him why he didn’t try and get the police involved in taking down the, quite frankly evil, man who owned the bar (I really try not to be biased on this blog, but please, this exploitation of young women was his ‘retirement plan’!). Mickey’s reply was that the police probably already knew about the goings on in the bar. Corruption and bribery is common in Thailand, but it’s rife on the border, and there are always officials who benefit from keeping quiet about illegal sex work. Besides that, if this bar got shut down, there would always be another ‘entrepreneur’ waiting in the wings to set up another. After all, as I've said before, due to its pervasive presence sex work in Thailand is far more ‘normal’, and thus accepted, than it is in the West. It’s one of the things I’m still not used to, and I’m not sure I ever will be. Even Pang, now safely in school but still living in the same border town, walks past her old workplace every day as if it's the most natural thing in the world; in fact, on our last trip to see her she even told Mickey that she goes to visit her aunt there who works in the kitchens (she actually really does just work in the kitchens!). Most people would assume that she would want to get as far away as possible from a place that holds such horrible memories; but Pang is evidently happy in her new life, going to school and helping her mother at the weekends (she now sells clothes at a little stall). We asked her if she was interested in coming to live at the shelter, but she said she preferred to stay at her current school and live with her family. It's a prime example of both the amazing resilience of young girls here, and the absolute normality of the trafficking and sex work industry.  

We’re always concerned about the children we sponsor outside of the shelter; we can visit Pang quite regularly, but six other girls are living at a safe house far off the beaten track. It’s a long trip to make; in fact in all the time I’ve been here, I’ve never visited them. This means we can’t be fully certain that they are going to school every day; they also don’t have access to the same quality of schooling and other opportunities that come with living close to a city. So we recently decided to set up a fostering system in a village we regularly do projects with and where we have good relations with the head (his daughter lives at Baan Yuu Suk as a sign of good faith and trust in COSA). This will mean that we get to monitor the girls’ wellbeing and schooling more closely, as they will be living with trusted families handpicked by the village head. It will also give the community more responsibility in monitoring and preventing trafficking in their own area. When you consider that they are dealing with not only internal trafficking, but also a flow of children coming in from neighbouring countries, this community support is more important than ever. 

Oh, hello 2012!

I’m pretty sure I’ve missed the window where it’s still acceptable to start off with a "Happy New Year", but somehow it isn’t January anymore, and since this is my first post of 2012, Happy New Year everyone! January started off busy here, with a group of Australian film students arriving for the month to shoot a short documentary about COSA and the work we do. The end result was pretty good, and can be viewed here: http://www.actualitymedia.org/portfolio/our-daughters-for-sale/.

We also had a recent surge of interest in English lessons from locals wanting to capitalise on the presence of native English speakers, and have been holding regular community English classes on the weekends. On Wednesdays and Thursdays we have volunteers teaching at the local school. This is a rather rollercoaster experience due to the patchy nature of Thai schools’ English curriculum, where beginners are taught phrases like ‘Stop and smell the roses’ but are unable to string together the sentence ‘I come from Thailand’. Indeed, from the moment my workmate asked a class to name a country beginning with R, and a boy shouted out ‘Rondon!’, we knew it would be an uphill struggle. However, our weekly presence has developed a good relationship with the school and the community in general, and COSA is all about working with communities, so onwards and upwards (aaaand, only four weeks until the end of term, not that anyone’s counting).

While on the topic of communities, last week we made our second MOSAIC trip up to the hilltribe village we work with. For those of you with poor memories or who didn't read the December post, MOSAIC stands for Medical Outreach and Social Aid in Communities, and aims to provide free primary healthcare and health education to remote hilltribe villages. The project not only improves the quality of life for the villagers, but also allows us to monitor any children at potential risk of being trafficked.

So our first stop was at the local primary school, where I defy even the most child-unfriendly among you not to come away a bit besotted; they were potentially the cutest kids I've ever seen. In the morning we carried out follow up checks on all the festy ears we saw in December, most of which had completely cleared up; the three year old with infectious sores that we saw on our last trip was also transformed into a bubbly, impetigo-free bundle of cuteness. So we were feeling very smug and pleased at how well the treatment had gone, until we registered new children and found, surprise surprise, more festy ears. We taught one of the teachers how to treat the ear infections in case of future outbreaks; this will hopefully minimise dependence on us, as we only have the resources to make five or six trips up a year. It turns out that household substances like vinegar and sodium bicarbonate mixed with water clear up minor ear problems very well (vinegar is really a wonder substance; aside from being highly delicious and clearing ear issues up, it has also caused the number of women who die of cervical cancer in developing countries to drop massively. Read this and you will fast become a vinegar-lover too: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/health/27cancer.html).

The second and third days of the trip were dedicated to follow up checks as well as registering new people. All those we had advised to come back for follow ups did so, which is encouraging as it means we aren't viewed as a one-off, but a regular, trustworthy presence. This did lead to serious discussions about the sustainability of the project; this time round we had an extra nurse on board, Lindsay, who pointed out the potential problem of the villagers becoming totally dependent on us for all their medical care; which, if we are prepared to do it, would need to be able to run for at least the next fifteen years, as the problem with so many NGO projects is that they start something up, only to shut down a couple of years later once they run out of funds and resources, and leaving the very people they had come to help in the lurch. At the moment we are in the process of working out whether to focus more on health education rather than health care, which would keep up our relationship with the village and potentially be a far more sustainable project for the long-term. We also have two ongoing projects that would contribute to this sustainability; on the last trip it was evident that many of the health problems seen were likely linked to the chemical spray that the villagers use on their crops, so we are currently carrying out a controlled experiment on a group of farmers to see if using protective masks reduces the symptoms, namely nausea, headaches and breathing problems. On our next trip we will go over the findings and if they prove that there is a definite link between these health issues and the spray, we will provide protective masks to all the farmers in the village. We are also in the process of getting a new water pump installed, which would provide drinking water for the whole village. These two projects will go a long way to reducing health problems in the village without us having to spend loads on drugs, and will keep the villagers more self-sufficient.

So all in all the week was eventful, though in more ways than one. To refresh your memories, back in October, we intercepted a group of children who were being smuggled through the village to be sent down south to work. At the moment they're living with families in the village, and going to a local school. While we were up there last week, we were told that these children were being continually questioned by the authorities about how they had come to be in that village in the first place. This is an intimidating procedure for the children, so much so that one girl has been taken out of the village by a member of her family altogether, and her whereabouts are now unknown. Considering that she had previously been trafficked, we're pretty concerned about her future. This prompted us to make a decision about the remaining children; we are unable to take in the boys as we only run a girls' shelter, so will have to think of another way to help them out, but the girls will be coming to live with us in April, once the school year is over (provided that their parents give their consent). There are eight of them, so it's a big number to introduce into the shelter; but we don't want a repeat disappearance, so will just have to hope Teenage Clique Syndrome won't set in with the girls already living here. As I've said before, they live in remarkable harmony despite being at the age where a bad haircut equals the end of the world, so hopefully the transition will be relatively smooth. Oh and I forgot to mention that we are now on a time limit to construct a new building before they arrive and have to sleep five to a bed. No pressure then.

So there we go, into 2012 at full throttle! It will be interesting to see what the rest of the year brings...

MOSAIC

December has turned out to be a bit of a whirlwind month. We had some bad luck with cars in the first two weeks; first our programme director was knocked off her motorbike and broke her collarbone. This was succeeded within a week by a drunk driver crashing his car right through the wall of the girls’ house. Luckily no-one was hurt in that incident, though there was a certain amount of hysteria on the girls’ part (understandable when someone drives a car through your bedroom wall while you’re sleeping). The driver was apprehended by two policemen, whose arrest was slightly ironic given that they were almost as drunk as him at the time.

So that had everyone a bit twitchy for a while- the screech of car tyres made us all flinch for a week! Luckily we all pulled ourselves together in time for the launch of COSA’s newest project, MOSAIC (Medical Outreach and Social Aid in Communities). As I’ve said before, COSA aims to create solid relationships with disenfranchised hilltribe communities; it is essential for the work we do. With mutual trust and respect, it is far easier to prevent trafficking, as villagers are more willing to co-operate and come to us if they feel children are at risk of being trafficked. In an effort to bolster our relationship with them, COSA and the various village heads held meetings to discuss what help COSA could bring to the villages. The unanimous opinion was to address the pressing need for proper primary healthcare. Many of these villages are, quite literally, off the beaten track, and are time-consuming to get to. As a result, one village hadn’t received proper medical aid for three years. They receive 800 baht’s worth of medical supplies monthly from the local health office; with 700 people in the village, this amounts to just over one baht per person, which would barely buy you a single Paracetamol. The villagers are often reluctant to go to hospitals as they tend to be treated badly given their hilltribe status, and can’t afford the treatment. Thus MOSAIC was developed, with the aim of providing free primary medical care to those who need it.

So we set off on the 12^th of December to the same village where we intervened in the trafficking of twenty-two children back in October (see October update for details). We were accompanied by Bronwen, a highly competent nurse from Australia, who brought with her an arsenal of medicine and equipment donated by the New South Wales ambulance service (even the defibrillator made it through customs, despite concerns it could be used to zap the pilot into unconsciousness). We were a bit apprehensive as to what to expect, given the tendency for villagers to distrust medical professionals, and had a bit of a restless first night (though that may have been partly to do with the cold- I didn’t know you could feel freezing in Thailand!). However, as it turned out, we needn’t have worried. The first morning we drove to the town hall to set up our makeshift medical practice, and were greeted by a long line of people eagerly waiting to be seen. We registered about thirty people in the first hour alone; this consisted of filling out a card with their details, as well as taking a photo to identify them with, as many of them don’t know their exact birth date. The medical process was slow, as Bronwen was our only medical professional, and communication with her patients was hampered by the translation from English to Thai to Ahka hilltribe dialect and back again. By the end of the day, though, we had managed to see roughly forty people, an excellent start considering we weren’t sure if we’d even see that many in the whole three days!

The next day we paid a visit to the local school, and examined the children that the teachers had expressed concern over. Those healthy enough not to be seen took part in some impromptu English lessons from yours truly and another volunteer. Most of the children examined had serious ear infections; as Bronwen put it to us in medical terms, “I’ve never seen such festy ears in my entire life”. Many of them were almost completely deaf, but didn’t complain of pain; apparently they’d had the infections so long they’d become used to it. On our first day, when driving past the school, we saw small boys up to their chests in a stagnant brown pond, fishing for crabs- no mystery as to where these infections sprang from!

On the last day, we saw the remaining patients registered on day one, and managed to squeeze in a few more who trailed in over the course of the morning. Overall we saw 100 people out of the 700 inhabitants of the village. A few people stood out from the crowd, including a man with a massive dent in his skull due to being hit by ‘something’ (he was very vague about the cause of this injury!) while working out in the fields a couple of years ago. He never sought medical attention and as a result had lost his ability to speak. Another was a three year-old with infectious sores all over her body. The most common problems over the whole trip were back pains and breathing problems, the former due to a life of hard labour, the latter from breathing in insecticide while working (the majority of the villagers are farmers). For many people, these problems have been going on for years and there wasn’t much we could do for them other than give them a mask to use while spraying. Despite this, the atmosphere in the waiting room was less that of a doctor’s surgery and more of a social gathering; those who weren’t being seen were laughing and gossiping, and eagerly watching the defibrillator measure their neighbour’s heartbeat; children ran around clamouring for stickers, exclaiming over our ‘beautiful’ white skin and playing with our hair (to the detriment of my scalp). The positive effects of the project were already clear to see by the end of the first day alone; we were no longer the strange bunch of ‘farang’ (foreigners), but friends that people recognised and waved to on the street. In the future, this trust will be invaluable for our work in preventing trafficking in their area. Already we have a young girl on our watch list; parentless, she is frequently moved from household to household. Often children like this are at high risk of being trafficked, but in coming to our attention early on we will be able to step in when or if the need arises.

However, the success of the project also highlighted the need for us not only to continue the good work we’ve started, but expand on it. This village is one of many in the area in serious need of the most basic healthcare, and we only just managed to reach demand this time round. We were asked by a teacher from a neighbouring village why we hadn’t visited their school too, where they have some children who have to walk ten kilometres to school and back again every day, some without shoes. The simple answer was that we didn’t have the capacity or resources to tend to them as well. In the future, once the project is more established, we hope to be able to go on monthly trips to numerous villages, with at least three or four medical professionals as well as translators. For now though, we just have to go by the adage of ‘Do what you can with what you have’; which, unfortunately for small NGOs such as ourselves, is not exactly a treasure trove.  Still, judging by the smiling farewell we got as we drove away, it was evident that the relationship we now have with this village, at least, is priceless (I'll allow myself that little bit of shmaltz seeing as it's the Christmas season!).

The shelter(ed) life

Time goes strangely at Baan Yuu Suk shelter: I’ve only been living/working (lirking?) here for about seven weeks, but it feels more like months. At the same time, I’m shocked to find that it’s already the end of November! Wasn’t it September just the other day? This is probably the effect of having your workplace double as your living space, which makes for a rather unique experience. Yes, sometimes it can feel like you’re never entirely off the clock, as it can be difficult to find the line between work time and play time (having attended meetings in my pyjamas I don’t think I’ll ever wear formal gear again). More often than not, though, it’s like being part of a very large family; after all, it’s hard to remain purely professional with someone who’s seen you in your jimjams. So we function as every family does, each person carrying out their specific tasks to ensure the smooth running of the household. For me and my colleagues-come-roomies, these responsibilities involve things like keeping up to date on sponsorships, volunteers and outreach programmes, as well as organising the girls’ activities and schedule.

The girls themselves have a list of duties; they follow a hefty weekly chore rota on top of going to school and homework. It’s a long, busy week for them, and it’s little wonder that one of our jobs includes chasing them up on their tasks. There has been a crackdown in discipline recently, as the girls have received poor grades for their last semester, so the socks are now being pulled up. Mickey has steadily limited their access to computers, as they seem to spend most of their allotted time on Facebook or Youtube, leaving homework to the last minute. Typical teenage behaviour, of course, but the problem here is that while most households have one or two teenagers to slap on the wrist when they procrastinate, this one has twelve. It’s hard to keep track of them all. They are generally good girls, and do a hell of a lot more than I ever did at their age, but they occasionally need pushed. As Mickey keeps reminding us, we aren’t here to be the girls’ friends. We are, in fact, acting ‘in loco parentis’, as COSA holds temporary guardianship of the girls. This means that we are not only responsible for making sure they do their homework and attend school; we have to teach them the life skills that will help them become responsible, independent grown-ups.

This is especially important when it comes to the Baan Yuu Suk girls; getting them a good education and making sure they grow into adults with minds of their own is essential, because there is always the possibility that they could fall into the life that COSA works hard to keep them from. We try to give the girls as normal a life as possible; it’s one of the reasons that we don’t bring new girls into the shelter until the start of a new school year, to ease the transition. However, the fact remains that these girls are still viewed as ‘different’ by society at large. At school, many other students know them as the ‘shelter girls’; they also come from hilltribes, which brings with it its own stigma. To give an example of a predominant opinion of hilltribes and Northern girls, a well-known Thai businessman recently wrote this on his Facebook wall:

“I really don’t want to say this because it will seem like I look down on women… but the truth is… Northern girls who are uneducated or lazy and intellectually retarded will look for an easy job that normal women won’t do… Mainly it’s prostitution … Therefore, the Northern woman who is devoid of intelligence and extremely stupid yet thick-faced enough to take up the position, you should know what profession suits you.’

This comment drew a lot of attention from women’s rights groups in Thailand, and outrage in much of the north. However, it still represents a substantial chunk of the Thai public’s prejudices against those from hilltribes and the Northern region. It is an image that the Baan Yuu Suk girls may have to struggle against as they get older; after all it’s easier to do what is expected of you than fight against it, especially in Thailand, where you are taught never to question the status quo from day one at school. Add to this the fact that prostitution is still by far and away the fastest way for a poorer girl supporting her family to make money, and you can see how strong a temptation this lifestyle is for young women here. 

And the danger of them slipping into prostitution is not just a problem when they grow up; there is a constant possibility that these girls could leave us at any moment. After all, they are only here through their family’s consent. We do not have the right to keep them here against their will. A while ago, COSA had a girl who had been rescued from trafficking and had been living at the shelter for some months. During this time, her sister was sent to work in a brothel down south. The sister phoned her parents begging to come home, so the father started smuggling drugs to pay off her debt to the brothel. He got caught, and was thrown in jail. The girl wanted to leave the shelter at this point in order to help support her family; Laura and Mickey begged her to stay and finish the last few months of the school year, but she was adamant to leave. If she had finished the year, it would have given her qualifications that would have allowed her to go on to vocational school; as it stands, she now has no qualifications that will get her an even half-decent job, and if she wants to go back to school she will have to start right back at a primary level, thanks to the rules of the Thai education system. The last COSA heard of this girl, she was down south with her sister, working at a ‘bar’. Many people and NGOs make the mistake of thinking that rescuing a child from trafficking solves the problem; it isn’t. It’s only the beginning of the road.

Sometimes, then, the balance between giving the girls a normal teenage life and making sure they don’t head down that dark alleyway is hard to get right. We occasionally have trouble with one of the girls here, who insists on walking home with boys after school, rather than walking home with the other girls. Now, it’s perfectly normal of course to see a fourteen year-old flirting with the opposite sex. However, when you know that the fourteen year-old in question has a mother who is a sex worker, and that she has spent her childhood surrounded by such a lifestyle, you can’t help finding yourself admonishing her just that little bit sharper than perhaps you should. 

You can't save them all....

My first week working with COSA is an eventful one, due to an unexpected occurrence a few days before I start. Mickey and some volunteers were visiting hilltribe villages 4 or 5 hours’ drive away, intended as an information-gathering mission on possible trafficking routes; however, when they arrived at one village, they were informed by the village head that a group of twenty-two children were being held there temporarily before being trafficked down south. After a quick discussion, the guys decided to take action and intercept them.

Now – before you’re carried away by visions of a muscled Arnie lookalike bursting in and carrying away five children under each arm, firing off a machine gun with his teeth, I must tell you, rescues rarely involve actual raids. In this case, the village head told the traffickers to leave town, which they did; the villagers rounded up the children and brought them to the chief’s house, where they were documented and photographed by our guys, before being temporarily installed in houses around the village. When I first heard this, I was very surprised; I may not have been expecting an Arnie showdown, but I certainly would have expected some form of protest on the side of the traffickers, seeing as their precious merchandise was being snatched away. There are two reasons for this lack of conflict: firstly, Thais as a general rule dislike confrontation. When a figure of authority tells you to do something, you do it. The second reason is darker; as Mickey points out to me, for every one kid rescued, there are ten to take their place. For the traffickers, supply is never a problem.

This leads me to a crucial point: trafficking is widespread here because it is viewed as normal. Officially by law, it is illegal, but there are deeper, far more ancient cultural factors at work that say otherwise. To give you an idea of just how everyday this is: the children’s current temporary homes in the village are the very same places they were being kept in transit before COSA intervened. The traffickers, rather than working secretly under cover of darkness as I had imagined, were working out in the open, paying people to keep the children in their homes. It is not illicit – it’s just business, one that everyone has a share of. As I said before, the majority of the time it’s families that sell their children. I don’t want to send the wrong message here; yes, for most of us, the idea of willingly putting one’s own child into such a situation is unthinkable, heartless, cruel. But as Laura, COSA’s programme director, told me a few days into the job, love and trafficking do co-exist; it’s not that parents don’t care about their children, but that they view things in a very different way from the West. We come from a culture where the role of a parent is to protect and provide for their children at all costs. In Thailand, the reverse is true, and it is seen as the child’s duty, even honour, to do anything they can to help their family. Add to the fact that sex work is seen as an acceptable, and more importantly, lucrative way to make money, and you can perhaps begin to see why this has become such an enormous industry.

This was something I found difficult at first; in battling trafficking, we’re talking about changing fundamental aspects of society, and who are we to come in with our ‘West is Best’ mentality, telling people that their way of life is wrong? However, as my very clever friend Mishal pointed out to me, ‘normal’ doesn’t mean that people automatically think it is right. After all, it’s ‘normal’ in Scotland to get paraletically drunk every weekend, and yes, while there’s no doubt it’s loads of fun, nobody who’s experienced a hangover could say that putting gallons of alcohol into your body is good for you - but everyone does it, so it's fine, right? Similarly, while there may be some here who find nothing troubling with trafficking children, there are many who know it is wrong, but considering its normality, do not know of any other way. This is why the work that COSA does is so important: we focus on preventing trafficking through educating communities about alternatives to this way of life.

So, as I was saying before my little aside – the first week at work is dominated by the rescue of these twenty-two children. I spend Monday settling into my new home, and on Tuesday make the journey up with Mickey to the village where they were found. The journey takes a long time, five or six hours, the road winding through jungley hills. The last stretch to the village takes us off the beaten track, literally – we’re jumping around like fleas in a blanket trying to navigate the bumpy path that’s been eaten away by the rainy season. The purpose of the visit is to conduct the first of what will be many interviews with the kids. In the early stages of rescue, it’s important to get details of the children’s origin and family circumstances, for a number of reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, it’s to get hold of their families and documentation like birth certificates. This is so we can register them as Thai citizens; being hilltribe children, they often aren’t registered, which creates problems when enrolling them in school. Since we aren’t a law-keeping force or government agency, we need the parents’ consent to take over temporary guardianship of their children. We can also keep an eye on any siblings and step in to offer aid if they seem at risk of being trafficked. Later interviews will focus on more personal information to provide to sponsors (one child sponsored for a year comes to just under £1000, which goes a long way here).

Right now though, the priority is to get them registered and under our custody, as we have emergency funding to tide us over until sponsorships are arranged. The group consists of about fourteen boys and eight girls. A few of them seem quiet, shy and wary, others fairly at ease.  We find out that many of the boys were intended for Chiang Mai as labourers, though one had already gone down to Pattaya for an ‘interview’ at a gay bar. When asked what he wanted to do (believe it or not, sometimes children don’t want to be rescued, feeling an obligation to their family), he replies, ‘I don’t want to work. I just want to go to school’. The girls are more subdued than the boys, and Mickey suspects that a couple of them have already worked in brothels. The way it usually works is that a family will take out a loan from the brothel owner, and the daughter works until it gets paid off. A lot of the time the family, used to the source of income, will take out a bigger loan once the first has been worked off, continuing the cycle.  Contrary to what you might have heard, brothel clientele generally aren’t Western sex tourists; they are usually local men or Asian tourists. Because of the huge rise in AIDS here over the past few years, there’s a growing demand for younger and younger girls, in the belief that they will be less likely to have STIs. Some even believe that having sex with a very young girl or a virgin increases your virility. Usually, however, the children we find are young teenagers, as with this current group, all of whom are above twelve.

Once the interviews are over, we sleep at the village head’s house, after being treated to some amazing food and home-brewed white whiskey - let's just say it's an acquired taste! The next morning, before heading off, we are told by the village head that there has been word of yet another group of kids being trafficked through a neighbouring village. I look at Mickey expectantly, but he just shakes his head. On top of the twenty-two children we have just interviewed, we have another fifty on the waiting list for spaces at Baan Yuu Suk and other safe houses; we have neither the resources nor the capacity to do anything about it. So we have to leave them. This is something I know I’ve got to get used to, or I’ll go crazy; but as we drive home, I remember Mickey’s pronouncement about there being ten children to replace every one rescued, and rather than focusing on the twenty-two children who are now safe because of us, I can’t help thinking about the two hundred and twenty who weren’t so lucky this time round.