Her Voice of Courage - Empowering Youth to End Human Trafficking

...Here, in this urban chaos of business and motorbikes, you will  sometimes meet someone, either a foreigner or Vietnamese, and he will  ask you what you do. In response to your saying that you work on anti -trafficking along the borders of Vietnam, he will say knowingly, “Yes, I  hear so many of these poor parents sell their own children for a few dollars, or a bag of coffee or something.” 

For their two daughters to attend school, they must consider how to pay for the school fees, facility expenses (such as building maintenance), uniforms, textbooks, and school supplies on 25 cents a day. They also  must factor in the loss of income if they allow their children to  continue their education instead of having them sell lottery tickets or  help in the fields. They must weigh their daughters’ tearful pleadings to  attend school, and their quiet, desperate love for their children, desperate beyond the short-term logic of their finances. They must balance what school means as an investment in their children’s future,  decades in the distance, when they are sometimes uncertain what the next few months will look like from the shallow bottom of a rice bowl. 

- Recollection by PALS Volunteer

Trafficking victims are often lured by the people they know  acquaintances, friends, lovers, and even family and are recruited  through deception and false promises of a more worthwhile life. What  are the consequences of this treacherous recruiting tactic? How will the deceit from a kin pull at the fibers of our community? Because everyone  here is a relative. Everyone is your uncle, your aunt, your sister and....read more.