Word: tippings
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...Forty-three," answers Mama San. She tells Tip and Lek to fetch their chips. The two tiny figures squatting at her feet jump up, run upstairs and return clutching gambling counters. "What the customers paid," explains Mama San. In the three months since Lek was brought to this back-street brothel in the northern Thai town of Mae Sai, she has collected eight white chips and four blues--equal to $59.50. Tip has done better: her chips add up to $163. "Not a bad little earner," says Mama...
Done. We shake hands. Tip and Lek have been sold. Again. This time to Jonathan, the photographer working on this story, and me. Mama San is not worried about finding replacements. "Their mothers or the middlemen bring them to me," she says. "There are always fresh ones...
...Jonathan and I talked with Lek and Tip over a few days, our sense of being impartial observers gave way to concern that just by watching the children's degradation, we were implicated. Then it occurred to us that we could buy their freedom. That's how we found ourselves driving to an ATM, and withdrawing 41,000 baht...
Once free, Lek and Tip appear unable even to consider that their mothers may have sold them into sexual slavery. They insist they want to go to Kentung, in Burma's eastern Shan state, to live with Tip's family. With trepidation, we agree to try to get them there. With traffic heavy on the bridge into Burma, the four of us cross unnoticed into the border town of Tachileik, which is a good thing, since the girls lack the requisite ID papers to enter their homeland. Fearing problems at checkpoints if we go to Kentung by road...
Only later do we learn that minutes before the aircraft departed, airport authorities threw Lek and Tip out, presumably for having no ID cards. Days afterward, we make an even more wrenching discovery: the mothers of both girls were in on the deal from the start and had received regular payments from the brothel, which might make an unexpected return home an unhappy occasion...