When Madison resident Jola Casey first heard about human trafficking it burdened her heart.
Casey, who is a youth leader at Lamont Wesleyan Church in Lamont, said about three years ago she was introduced to the issue of human trafficking. At youth camp a woman from World Hope International spoke to students about human trafficking and some other issues, Casey said.
“When she mentioned that word, it just instantly did something to me and my spirit and so from that point on it just felt like human trafficking just kept coming up in my life,” Casey said. “There were several different times that the issue would come up. It intrigued me and it burdened my heart.”
In December 2009, Casey attended a youth conference in Denver and she sat down and talked to a woman from World Hope International that had just returned from Cambodia.
“She shared a lot of information with me,” Casey said. “It seemed so interesting to me and at the same time was so hard for me to understand. And so I think typically what God does, he just doesn’t let those things go if you’re meant to be part of the solution to the problem.”
In the summer of 2010, Casey’s pastor went on sabbatical and there were several guest speakers during the summer. One of the guest speakers was Jo Anne Lyon, founder and chairwoman of World Hope International.
“She came to the church and spoke about all the different things she had done with World Hope and she talked about human trafficking and that she was actually the one who initiated the efforts on human trafficking in Cambodia,” Casey said. “After she was done speaking I went and talked to her and told her that I had been burdened with this and told her I wanted to do a trip and she said I definitely should. So she is a very, very assertive and amazing woman who I consider a role model in my life.”
Headed to Cambodia
Two weeks after talking to Lyon, Casey got an e-mail stating there was a team going to Cambodia and there was room for Casey.
“When I got the e-mail I just looked at my husband – this was back in June last year – and he said ‘so what’s stopping you?’” Casey said.
Casey said yes to the trip without knowing how much it was going to cost. It cost about $3,500 just to go on the trip and that wasn’t counting spending money, Casey said.
“It was just amazing,” she said. “I received donations from people I didn’t even know who were also burdened by the issue of trafficking and they knew this was a way of helping.”
The trip was in October and Casey had some anxiety about going with people she had never met before and going to a country she had no prior experience with. The women had e-mailed each other to get to know each other a bit, but it was still a bit of a nerve-wracking experience at first, Casey said.
“It was an amazing, diverse group of women,” Casey said.
The purpose for the trip was to be ambassadors and learn as much as they could in the amount of time they had and to share what they knew about the Lord and also to be ambassadors to World Hope.
“It takes a very specially-trained person to work in human trafficking,” Casey said. “It’s not like going to another country and building a church or doing a Bible study with native children. Our job was basically to go there, meet the people that were working in the trafficking, meet some of the girls that had been rescued, and then come home and share that information with people and burden other people’s hearts with the issue and find a way to help from here.”
Rescue of the girls
Casey said the key point of the trip was when the group visited and worked in World Hope’s assessment center. The assessment center served as a place where girls involved in trafficking could go after they were rescued from brothels. Officials work closely with the center and the International Justice Mission, which is a faith-based rescue group.
Brothels were investigated and children who were being held as sex slaves were rescued.
“The assessment center is ready to receive rescued girls,” Casey said, adding that the World Hope assessment center is one of the most well known assessment centers in Phnom Penh, which is the capital of Cambodia.
When Casey was in Cambodia, the girls at the center ranged in ages from 8 to 14 but the center takes all children under 18. When they are rescued, they go through a three-month process. First, they are brought in and allowed to de-program and realize they are in a safe place. Then they go through extensive counseling and eventually go to shelters.
“There’s a whole network of shelters the girls will go and live in,” Casey said. “They’re not World Hope shelters, but they’re partners with World Hope.”
Khmer (native) women are hired to be house mothers in the shelters so that the culture is maintained, Casey said.
“They have that connection with their culture in having these women with them,” Casey said.
Nearly all of the girls won’t return to their families, Casey said.
“Most of the time the families won’t take them back because they are damaged,” Casey said. “A lot of times the families have sold them. A lot of times they have innocently sold them. Lots of times the brothel owner says they have an opportunity in a restaurant and they give some money up front and they never see them again.”
A target for
trafficking
Another aspect of the trip was working with village girls, who are typical targets for human trafficking, Casey said. Few of the girls are from Phnom Penh. Most are from villages.
“They go out and play on their ignorance and use that as their playing card,” Casey said. “A lot of people (in the villages) don’t have any idea this goes on.”
The brothels
Most of the men who visit the brothels in Cambodia are Cambodian men, Casey said.
“I think there’s a real misnomer about American and European men going there,” Casey said. “But 90 percent of the men are Cambodian.”
The younger the girl, the more expensive she is. A girl that is 16 may cost $1 to have sex with. A younger girl, especially a virgin, could cost several hundred to $1,000.
“Some of them believe if they have sex with a virgin it will cure their AIDS,” Casey said. “There are lots of STDs.”
Casey said the brothels are very much accepted in Cambodian culture.
“It’s a different kind of thing. It’s almost like a cultural acceptance there, unlike here,” she said. “We were all very amazed at how accepting the people are. The wives of the john’s, they fully know they are going to frequent the brothels.
“One night we did go out and spend the whole night driving through the red light district, which was just a really horrible experience for all of us.”
Casey said a man could get on a motorcycle, which are used as taxis in Cambodia, tell the driver they were looking for a brothel, how much he wanted to spend and that he wanted a young girl and the driver would know exactly where to take him.
“We had a time where we prayed for the men because it’s so readily available to them,” Casey said.
The girls of legal age were out on streets. The girls that weren’t of age were kept inside. A special red light was located inside, such as a certain wall, to let people know where the youngest girls were located.
The brothels, which are legal in Cambodia, are divided into three districts — low class, middle class and high end.
Working with
the children
The children of Cambodia are generally very dirty, Casey said.
“It’s a very dirty culture and there is a constant smell of sewage,” she said. “Children are not very well taken care of, which was a shocker to a lot of us. I had been to Belize and the children there are absolutely spotless. The parents there have a lot of pride in their children.”
A small baby would be naked in Cambodia and an older baby would only have a t-shirt, Casey said. Diapers aren’t used.
The group Casey was with decided to bring a suitcase apiece filled with school supplies for the village children.
“The children of Cambodia the group worked with had no idea what crayons were,” Casey said. “They had never seen crayons, markers or scissors, anything like that.”
The group, prior to going to Cambodia, had come up with simple ideas for crafts. One idea was to have children make a face on a piece of construction paper and glue that to a popsicle stick.
Casey said the only school supplies in the classroom was wooden desks, a slate and a chunk of chalk. Each child was sent home with a bag of modern school supplies.
“They had no idea how to hold a crayon or anything,” Casey said. “For us it was an amazingly humbling experience.”
For more information on World Hope International go to www.worldhope.org.