Cambodia and Thailand

In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, we visited the sites of Hagar International, a group who is tirelessly working to break the cycle of poverty by intervening in the lives of young women and children, offering aid, comfort, training and reintegration programs for those women rescued from life as a prostitute.

I wish I could show you photos of these women and the facilities Hagar uses to house and care for them, but it is necessary to protect the identity of the women, as well as the whereabouts of the facilities. All too often a mama son or agent for the prostitute's owner will seek to track down the woman, so as to forcibly take her back to the brothel or street corner where she can return to making money for them.

Chab Dai is another organization we visited. This is a coalition of over 40 Christian Organizations working with victims or those at risk of being victimized. This organization tirelessly works at discovering or developing strategies for not only rescuing those women caught up in prostitution as sex-slaves, but strategies for preventing Human Trafficking altogether.

One simple strategy:

Worker: Hello Village Elders! Have any of your young women disappeared … been taken away to work as sex-slaves?

Elders: O, no way!

Worker: Uhhh, let me ask another way: have any of your young women been offered jobs in far away countries?

Elders: O YES!!!

Worker: Let me explain something to you …


A vendor selling his wares on an "alley" off of the Chao Phrya River that runs through the heart of Bangkok

New Construction!

In Bangkok, Thailand, we saw the works of Home of New Beginnings, Rahab Ministries, and Nareethon.

Each of these works is dedicated to serving and caring for women who have been victims of human trafficking and sex-slavery. One of the main goals is to equip these women with skills/trade so that they can support themselves. As you read earlier, these women usually cannot go home, and definitely will have trouble ever finding a husband, as they are no longer virgins. (It constantly baffled me: the same men that used these gir's services are the yahoos screaming, “What: Me marry a woman who is not a virgin?”)

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2008