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...