Word: sais
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...Although Lek and Tip have been in Mae Sai for only a few months when we meet them, they have already learned to hide their inner thoughts. "We don't have feelings anymore," says Tip. "We cleared them out." But they can still dream of freedom, can still tell us they want out. They talk about how hard they would hug their mothers if they ever get home, so tightly no one could ever separate them again. "My mother would be really upset if she knew what I was doing and I desperately want to tell her," says...
...clown in a school play. The most popular of the girls in her brothel, picked out by up to three customers a day, she insists she has never been happier. But sitting in a restaurant by the Nam Ruak River, the 10-m-wide watery frontier at Mae Sai's northern end, Pim can't stop gazing at her homeland on the opposite bank. For a few moments, the mask drops. "No one is here because they want to be here," she murmurs. "Everyone's here because they have to be." Looking away, she starts quietly weeping. Without a good...
...hired a minivan: Pim describes how her first day in captivity was spent driving from village to village as the man picked up a total of 12 girls. Bribing his way past the many Burmese road checkpoints and buying forged visitor papers allowing the girls to work in Mae Sai proved to be routine. The rebel threat and drug running give even honest Burmese security forces in the area other priorities...
...suspects her mother knew her true destiny. Lek and Tip, on the other hand, appear unaware, or unable to admit, that their mothers sold them into sexual slavery. Lek says she came to Mae Sai because she wanted to earn money to help her widow mother buy their rented house. A friend approached her in a market near her house in Rangoon, she says, and asked simply whether she wanted to make money in Thailand. She jumped at the chance. Tip, like Pim, was recruited by an agent but insists her mother thought she was going to be cleaning houses...
...parents or the village head," says Waing. Such arrangements, she adds, are extremely rare. "Generally these are the very people who sent them away in the first place." Since starting up a repatriation program early last year, World Vision has managed to bring only three girls back from Mae Sai...