New America Media, Blog , Andrew Lam,
Posted: Sep 27, 2011
Dear readers,
As a writer and journalist, I rarely participate in the stories that I write about. But there’s an exception to this rule, when it comes to human trafficking in Vietnam. Last year, having traveled to the area most effected – Mekong Delta bordering Cambodia – and seen for myself how some victims escaped, survived, and managed to remake their lives through the help of Diep Vuong’s program called Adapt – Adapt– an NGO that seeks to prevent the trafficking of young girls and women by enhancing their educational attainment and improving their vocational choices, I feel compelled to help.
Vietnam has become a country of dazzling wealth and humiliating poverty and the poor – so poor they starve – have to sell their own children to survive. For $400 dollar, “buyers” take a girl to Cambodia where she’s processed through a sophisticated network and trafficked elsewhere. Here’s one story I recorded while there last year.
Escape from a Cambodian Brothel
and heres a mini documentary I co-produced for pbs in which Diep Vuong is featured:
Viet Kieu in Vietnam 35 Years after the Vietnamese war Ended
In any case, as I am raising funds for their programs – $200 dollars will send a girl to school and give her enough to live on for a year, $75 dollars will give a kid a bicycle that she can use to go to school that sometimes is 7 miles away from her house in the rural – I am asking samaritans to give what they can.
If you are able, would you consider donate to Pacific links Foundation. (it's tax deductible) You can go y to the org - adaptvn.org and find out more as to how you can donate.
Human trafficking is one of the most hideous phenomenons of our time, and though I doubt we can ever eradicate it, I want to help the people who are at the front line fighting it.
Thank you,
Andrew Lam, author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora and East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres.
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