Welcome to Baan Yuu Suk

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of the work that goes on here, you’ll need to know a bit about COSA’s history. It was started in 2005 by Mickey Choothesa - a veteran war photographer and a bit of a legend I might add. Twelve or thirteen years ago, he was covering the drug routes running through Southeast Asia, mostly around Burma, and became aware that a lot of human trafficking was also going on. This piqued his interest, and he began to research and document the trafficking industry, in particular child trafficking. He gave photography exhibitions around the world, and donated a lot of the money from these to various organisations, before deciding to start up his own NGO. At first, it was a project spanning the whole Mekong region of Southeast Asia, but due to the bureaucracy and corruption of local authorities (more on that later), his work became focused on Northern Thailand and the hilltribes that inhabit the region. Hilltribes traditionally have a low status in Thailand; there are six major tribes originating from China, Tibet, Burma and Laos, each with their own dialect and customs. They usually make a living through farming, and are among the most impoverished of Thailand’s population. Here, school is only free up until the age of twelve, which means that a large proportion of the hilltribes have no higher education; and in Thailand, even working in your local 7-11 supermarket is impossible without high school qualifications. Hilltribe children, then, are at an especially high risk of trafficking; selling your body pays a lot more than harvesting rice.

So COSA began to work with these communities, focusing not only on rescuing children being trafficked, but trying to prevent it happening in the first place; this involves educating the communities on anything from English lessons to sustainable agriculture, and providing free medical care and social services. If a child is seen to be at risk of being trafficked, we step in and offer families an alternative; that we will feed, clothe, shelter and educate their child. Most of the time, they accept. This is where the Baan Yuu Suk shelter comes in; at first, COSA worked with another organisation that provided a safe house for the children. However, it quickly became clear that a lot of the money COSA was giving towards the children wasn’t being spent on the kids and that they weren’t being well cared for, quite a common problem with many NGOs here (there have also been cases of paedophiles running shelters). Well, if you need a job done properly, best to do it yourself it seems. So a couple of years ago, COSA opened its own shelter, Baan Yuu Suk.

The shelter, whose name translates as ‘House of Peace/Happiness’, and my home for the next six months, stands on a large plot of land on a quiet road just off Mae Rim. It has a big veggie patch, a mushroom hut and a chicken coop with chickens that…well, are pretty useless, they never lay eggs, I think they might end up in our dinner sometime soon.  There’s a recently built house for the girls that stay here – thirteen of them in all, ranging from five to seventeen. Their old house is in the process of being renovated to make a home for the volunteers and long-term employees. Which means that currently, we’re all crammed into Mickey’s house, which has an office, a large kitchen and living area, and a room that will soon be a library, but right now has six volunteer beds in it. Three of us sleep out in the living space, with some boards put up to give a semblance of privacy. We’re so close together that if I wanted to I could flick the nose of the person in the bed next to me; if you’re not a people person, this place would be a nightmare.

Which brings me to my fellow inmates; we have Mickey, previously mentioned boss/founder/legend. His wife Anna I haven’t met, as she’s in Australia, and will be for a while as she’s pregnant with their third kid and is going to give birth to the baby over there. There’s Laura, the programme director from Colorado, who’s been here about 7 months, and is great; very laidback with a dry sense of humour.  Fah, a local woman, is probably best described as the mother of the house; she cooks, cleans, and makes sure the girls do their chores and stay out of trouble. Rahel is from Germany and is volunteering here for a year. Finally there’s Esther from Holland, who’s doing her social work internship with COSA for the next five months. Luckily we all get on, because if we didn’t, this community living would result in murder: living where you work takes some getting used to. Aside from us long-termers, we also have a constant flow of volunteers coming in and out; they're here for weeks or months depending, and do various workshops and projects with the girls, ranging from art to yoga.

Finally, and most importantly, there’s the girls themselves. I’ve only been here for three weeks, so don’t know all of them that well (the language barrier doesn’t help; we communicate in a mixture of broken English and Thai, which I’m trying to learn and is a slow process due to the fact that one word can have five different meanings!). However, here’s what I do know so far; that you could never get a bunch of teenage girls living in one room in Britain without a daily tantrum/kittenfight/any other silly drama. With these girls, there is virtually none of that; they’re all very close and help each other out. Some of them COSA managed to intercept before they were trafficked, but others have already been sex workers; to look at them, you would never know what they’ve been through. They’re very well adjusted, cheerful, friendly, normal kids. On one of my first days, Laura explained that, culturally, Thais don’t tend to linger on the past; they are very much focused on the present, which I think accounts a lot for their remarkable resilience. She told me about one art therapy project they did with a volunteer, where they were supposed to draw something that depicted sadness. One girl (who has spent time working in a brothel) couldn’t think of anything to draw. They asked, ‘Well, anything from the past that made you sad?’, and she replied, ‘Well, yes, but right now, I’m happy’. Don’t get me wrong; from what Laura has told me, they have their moments, as it is only natural that they would. For the most part though, they are impressively stoical. Interestingly, Laura tells me that boys have a much harder time adjusting once they are rescued, and need a lot more professional psychological care, which is one of the reasons we don’t take in boys.

So- the setting is set. To come: the first week, including the unexpected rescue of twenty-two kids being trafficked through a hilltribe village, and a grim reminder of just how widespread this problem is.

NB: I realise this is a pretty cursory overview of the organisation: if anyone’s interested in learning more about it, the website is www.cosasia.org. You can also make donations on it, hint hint. 

Getting started despite writer's blog (see what I did there?)

Getting started is always the hardest part of any piece of writing. After scrapping quite a few first drafts of my intro, I’ve decided to just tell you all the truth, which is that, up until recently, I had a pretty low opinion of blogs. They struck me as self-absorbed, waffly diatribes of people who believe their every thought is a stunning revelation about the meaning of life. Thanks, but I don’t want to hear about how trekking through Tibet helped you find your inner peace, or what you did from the moment you got up to the moment your inflated head hit the pillow. So I’ve steered clear of them, until a rather wise friend pointed out that, while some people may use blogs like this, more often they are used to serve a purpose akin to journalism, albeit perhaps less professional; they can be a valuable tool for broadcasting information. Now, whether that information is important enough to warrant attention is up to the reader; so I’d better let you decide by telling you how I ended up writing this first difficult paragraph….

So, I arrive in Bangkok just over a month ago, with the intention of finding work as an English teacher in Thailand for a few months before exploring Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and doing some voluntary work here and there. After a week of Bangkok madness (and Bangkok belly but I’m sure you don’t want to hear the details), I get the night train up to Chiang Mai, known as Thailand’s cultural capital. Sadly it doesn’t seem to be its employment capital, as after a few days of cycling the streets looking ridiculous in my formal interview gear, it becomes obvious that teaching jobs are thin on the ground. Shame on you, misleading websites assuring teaching jobs galore! To distract myself from the potential failure of my plan I try and make at least some of it happen, and start looking for volunteer work. I hit upon an organisation based just outside Chiang Mai; the Children’s Organisation of Southeast Asia (COSA), which works to prevent child sex trafficking. Score! This is just the kind of work I’m interested in. I’ll be able to get some good experience volunteering for them a couple of times a week, even if it’s only a short while before I’m forced to return home penniless.

However, when I get to the shelter, it's even better than expected. Mickey offers me a volunteering position working as a liaison between COSA and a well-known Australian organisation they work with, and will get to live and eat at the shelter for free.  My job will involve writing reports on the children we take in, dealing with sponsoring, and documenting how we spend our funding. Because of the strong community-based nature of the organisation, it will also involve a lot of fieldwork, going up to interview hilltribe families in the surrounding area and gathering information on those who are at risk of being trafficked. In other words, the most amazing job I can possibly think of doing here. Needless to say, I accept without trying to hyperventilate with excitement, and just over a week later I’m installed at the shelter they run on the outskirts of Mae-Rim, a small town half an hour’s drive from Chiang Mai.

So there you have it. I’ve been here at COSA for three weeks now, and have learned a lot already: so much, in fact, that it’s impossible to just keep it to myself. My own assumptions about trafficking, which I know are shared by many, have been challenged and overturned in a mere month. Myth buster number one:

Nine times out of ten, it is families who sell their children to traffickers and brothels. Contrary to what you may have expected, it is not because they are starving to death and sacrificing one child so that the others can live. Instead, many (though by no means all) do it to acquire material goods like televisions or a car, in order to ‘make face’ (earn respect) within their village. In an impoverished community like that of the hilltribes, material wealth often comes to matter more than the wellbeing of an individual.

This is the type of thing that I think is crucial for people to know; for it is only through understanding the culture behind the sex industry and the reasons behind people selling their children into it that we stand a chance of changing it. Over the next six months, I’ll be giving regular updates of my life here at COSA, in the hope of giving a glimpse into the true reality of the trafficking situation.  It’s only a small start to combating such a many-headed hydra, but still, it’s a start. And if I start spouting anything about how the orange glow of the sunsets here reflect the growing spark of knowledge within me, tell me to shut it.