Word: thai
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...feet jump up, dart under the two pink strips that provide the only light in the bar, run upstairs and return breathlessly clutching gambling counters. "What the customers paid," explains Mama San. In the three months since she was brought to this backstreet brothel in the northern Thai town of Mae Sai, Lek has collected eight white chips and four blues - a total of $59.50. Tip has done better: 20 whites, 10 blues and four reds make $163. "Not a bad little earner," says Mama...
...silence, Tip and Lek embrace. Lek claps, hoarsely barks something in slang at the 15 other girls lined up on a bench in front of the bar and runs, shrieking and giggling into the street, with her waist-length black hair trailing. The teenagers ignore her, locked into a Thai adventure-romance on the television overhead. For a moment, Tip stays where she is, her childlike hands clasped in front, bony elbows between her knees. Then she shuffles over to join the row of moon faces turned up toward the screen. She and Lek have been sold. Again...
...millionaires of Bangkok and Hong Kong, live two-thirds of the world's extreme poor - 790 million people earning less than $1 a day. In the race to escape their deprivation, whole villages are sometimes complicit in the sale of their children. The procurers, says Sompop Jantraka, a leading Thai activist who has saved thousands of girls from being sold into brothels, might be the wives of village heads. Teachers know which children are vulnerable, and some alert procurers for a fee. He has seen pickup trucks full of girls sold to brothels leaving from schools in what is called...
...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 command of Thai or the right documents allowing her to return to her village in Burma, Pim has given up all hope of leaving. Besides, her Mama San insists Pim owes her $2,000, her purchase price. And how could she get money to pay? When asked if she wants to go home, she looks...
...price that Kentung's daughters pay for their parents' poverty can be found in its graveyards. The idyllic-looking hillside hamlet of traditional wooden houses and carved balconies brimming with mountain flowers is four hours north of the Thai border by car. In a town of perhaps 5,000 people, the AIDS epidemic imported from over the frontier reached the point in the late 1990s where someone died every day, according to one Western aid worker. The rate has since fallen, but it's not a sign of improvement. Rather, it's a reflection of the earlier devastation. World Vision...