- Poor, but happy and now with prospects!
The Shan State has an unfortunate reputation for selling its daughters into both the Thai and Chinese sex industries. In response, we have been operating a girls’ preventative prostitution work within the heart of the problem. Opium fields and a raging civil war are not far away. Come and meet some of our girls.
But firstly… There are many opium addicts. To feed their habit they have to find around US$12/day which necessitates them having to steal from others to pay for his habit. They become takers and do not contribute to the family unit. This makes life very difficult for the family because it is likely that he will owe money to many. In the end he will be arrested by the police for one misdemeanour or another.
Mary (20) is our oldest girl. She came to us six years ago from a village located about 20 miles away from our girls’ home base. Mary has successfully gained access to university where she studies a first year history course. Hers is a three year degree. Her dad is a drunkard/opium addict. Her mum is a hard worker toiling away in the opium fields. She only earns about US$1/day
Mary is a wonderful servant at our home. She cooks the meals for the whole household. Cooking breakfast and preparing lunch for the girls prior to going off to study at university. Then when she returns home she cooks dinner. Impressive!
Jean (12) comes from a village located about 30 miles away from our girls’ home base. She has two siblings. She studies in grade 8. So far she is not really a very smart student but Jean is relationally strong with the other girls. Currently she has very short hair. This is likely to be because of either the hot climate from where she hails or maybe because of a Buddhist religious ritual.
- House mum and daughter – safe at last
Jay’s dad is dead. The opium got him. Mum is a farm worker who cannot earn enough to buy her family two daily meals.
Tin’s dad is an opium addict who wastes all of the family’s money. Mum is not able to support the whole family so as a result most of Tin’s siblings must work instead of going to school. If Tin did not come to live with us, by now she could probably be a roadside labourer breaking rocks with a hammer. That would have been be her lot in life.
The support that you provide is cutting edge in that there are probably no other safe houses that are orientated towards developing and mentoring youth in the whole of the state. Currently we are building a two-storey home for our girls so that we can expand the number of teenages that we care for. See our page Shan Girls Construction
REPORT Background to Social Problems in the Shan State:
The Shan State has a population of 5.5 million people of which 99.9% are Buddhist. Shan people are staunchly Buddhist and fiercely independent. I wish that our Shan work was bigger – currently we care for 12 girls, soon it will be 20. I wish that we could take in more kids but we have to build up slowly and stay under the government radar. As an organisation Empower Asia has no desire to be or appear to be subversive.
A year or two ago our house dad there wrote the following to our Treasurer before the current crackdown:
“Every house in xxxx (where our house is located) has been checked once a week by the local authorities. The people here are very tired because of the rallies that the government authorities force the public to take part in. If the people do not go to the rally then the soldiers beat them bitterly.
When they are at the rally, the anti-government (rebels) will burn whole villages down in retaliation for their attendance. Our people here are very pitiful and confused. Many have warned me not to go out of xxxx because of the tensions. Because of this it is difficult to visit other places even though I have found intelligent suitable girls in the provinces to come and live at the home. The provinces are not safe at all … One problem is that the girls that we have found who are born in remote areas do not have birth certicficates so it is impossible for them to enrol in school. I just have a great hope that we would have peace very soon. My heart is burdened for my wife and I have found many girls who are hopeless and helpless… More than most of them live in fear.
Let us hope together that we will be able to bring the girls to live at our home on time … I will contact you via phone with our own dialect – that will be much safer.”
Mathida ended up in child prostitution. See how this happened, click here
- They never could have dreamt that one day they would be studying at university.
Of all of the girls that we care for, our Shan girls are the most at-risk. Their family backgrounds are the stuff of television documentaries. Until girls like these ones came to live with us they knew no better. These are true stories from interviews held with girls who come from the Burmese side of the Golden Triangle.
1. Vans regularly travel from Thailand around Shan villages picking girls up and taking them back over the border to work in the Thai sex industry. (In Thailand we have an expression for this which translates as The Green Harvest - the implication being that innocent kids are being harvested for the sex industry). Our Shan girls refer to this seemingly unspectacular activity as going to Chiang Mai. Shan girls are highly prized in Thailand because of their lack of worldly-wise sophistication and because of their nice white complexion.
2. Nearly all of our twelve girls come from families that work in the opium fields. One girl reported how her house and family opium plantation were torched. As a result her father could not provide for his family. His five kids have had to leave home, splitting up and living in four different locations.
3. A block of opium can regularly be used as currency when cash is not available.
4. One girl said that there are about sixty huts in her village. They have three open air public toilets only! No walls. They simply go do their thing in public and then clean themselves with a stick when they are finished. She claims that there simply are no educated people in the village. Her dad died of malaria because he did not have a mosquito net. Normally the girls in her village finish school at Grade 4 then go off to work in the plantations. When they discover that there is no money in this to help their parents they then look for other more viable forms of employment.
How easy it would be to persuade these kids to go into prostitution by merely waving a few hundred dollars in front of them?
5. The Burmese state army (run by the majority Burman Buddhist people group) has a program called Burmanisation whereby they send Burman soldiers to the Shan State to marry, sleep with or merely rape Shan women. This is so that over a period of years sufficient ethnic cleansing will have taken place to hopefully ensure that there will no longer be any pure Shan people left.
6. One girl reports how thirty-two villages (including hers) were torched by the Burmese army. She is way too scared to admit it but it will be because the villagers fed and housed the Shan Rebel Army. When villages are torched like this boys can be taken away as child soldiers, women raped and people murdered. They lose everything.
