"She is Not Abandoned."

Recovering from the trauma caused by the sex trade is a long process with many ups and downs. In the best of economic times, where there are real opportunities for employment outside of the sex trade, this can be very hard. But in times of widespread hardship, like what most of the world is facing today due to the COVID-19 pandemic, recovery can seem completely unachievable. Take for example, Nat*. 

  

Nat had previously been working in a brothel in Pattaya in order to make enough money to support her family. She had pre-existing health issues that made even wearing high-heels or standing for any length of time very painful. She didn’t like her situation, but she knew no other option.



One day Nat messaged one of our volunteers to tell her she was ready to leave the brothel, but she needed our help to do it. We quickly made a plan, picked her up, and in short order had her on a bus back to her home village. We helped her with the finances and coaching needed to start her own business, and soon she was successfully selling food at the market near her daughter’s school. We have always been so happy for Nat. Unfortunately, recently Nat’s happy story took a turn. 



Nat’s daughter was about to move onto high school and that transition would bring some added expenses to the family such as new uniforms. Nat was in the process of figuring out how to cover these extra finances when COVID-19 come on the scene. The schools shut down. Her customers (students and teachers) were no longer coming to her market but were staying at home. While Nat’s business had been successful, she was still making only enough for her expenses, and did not have a lot of savings to fall back on. She suddenly has no income. Furthermore, once the schools finally do open back up, Nat may have to ask her daughter to quit school to help her work.



However, we will do whatever we can to make sure that doesn’t happen. Part of supporting a woman’s recovery is seeing that the daughters of the women we help don’t find themselves faced with the same impossible situations their mothers had to face.



Nat’s situation is desperate…but unfortunately, it is not uncommon. Right now, many of our students who had transitioned to healthy jobs (at hotels, restaurants, etc.) have already been laid off and are facing difficult times. We also have many students who were still working in the brothels who suddenly have no clients. While in good times this could seem like a positive, with no alternative work to be had and simply speaking, no clients equals no food. Others even want to go home to their families, but some provinces have restricted travel, leaving them stranded in Pattaya.



It is at times like these that we throw the normal playbook out the window. Words, like process, eventually, and work towards are meaningless. In this immediate moment, our students don’t need English training, or interview strategies, or budgeting skills. Our students need food to eat.



 We are very aware that some of you reading this may have recently lost your own jobs as a result of COVID-19. Maybe you’re in your own desperate situation, not unlike the situations our students are facing. Times of global difficulty can be strangely unifying. As stories from Thailand or the US or Spain are far more the same than different. It’s harder to distance ourselves from other’s suffering when we ourselves are becoming acquainted with the same fear and uncertainty. While this may also mean that your resources to help are not what they were before, we want to ask you to consider helping in any way that you can.



 We have begun to provide food for the women we know who are hungry. We plan to grow this aid to help more and more women. As we all become more personally familiar with the sense of uncertainty and hardship that many of our students are already too familiar with, let us choose love over fear. Let's partner together with the much or the little we have and let us remind these precious women what we have been telling them all along. Your life may be hard, and many may have used you and devalued you, but you are precious. You are not alone. You are not abandoned.



 *a pseudonym has been used in the telling of this true story