Strength to share

One of my deepest personal joys is seeing Blue Dragon kids take an interest in caring for others.

In some ways I wish that all of the kids we raise would go on to become carers and advocates, but I maintain that the motivation has to come from within, and not be a requirement for receiving our help.

So when our girls and boys do choose to pursue a career in Social Work, or volunteer at the Blue Dragon centre on the weekends, or repay their university scholarship to us early so we can use it to help somebody else, I know that their compassion really comes from the heart, and not just a sense of obligation.

'Cuong' is one Blue Dragon boy who has discovered a deep concern for other children, and who looks for ways to help. Despite the many difficulties of his own life, he has an instinct to protect those around him who are in need.

His part time job in the evenings is teaching rollerskating to children at a local park. As he takes the smaller kids by the hand and skates out onto the rink, his face shines with real joy. He has helped another person to stand tall and learn something new.

Teaching rollerskating: 'Cuong' is at the back

Last week, Cuong travelled out of Hanoi with other Blue Dragon kids and staff to spend the holiday week in a rural village. There they visited an orphanage, taking time to help others and to reflect on their own lives.

Cuong was right in there, picking up any crying babies and playing with the toddlers as though they were his own brothers and sisters.

 

Visiting an orphanage 

A telling moment was when he turned to staff and said: It makes me realise how much I have in life.

Such an insight is not easy for a teenage boy to have. It would be easy for him to wallow in self pity at all the hardships life has thrown his way - none of which he has deserved.

In caring for others, Cuong is overcoming his own difficulties.

But more than that: he has a heart to share, and he has learned that he can share it in spite of his hardships.

And if Cuong can do it...



www.bluedragon.org


Names have been changed for privacy.

The long haul

Blue Dragon works from a centre in Hanoi, where most of our team is based. A few years ago we also established a centre in central Vietnam to support the several hundred kids and families we help there in the fight against human trafficking.

But our work takes us far and wide throughout the country. Not a day goes by that we're not out on the road, often in isolated and remote areas, reuniting a homeless child with their family or investigating a case of missing children.

Over the past week, we've been working on a case that has been even more extreme than usual. The Rescue Team been travelling through central China, more than 2000km from the border of Vietnam, to find a trafficked 13 year old girl, "Quy". As the case isn't yet over, we can't share too many details, but this has been an urgent and tense case with quite a lot at stake.

Quy is safe now, but of course deeply traumatised by what's happened and desperate to get home. She was evidently taken and sold as a bride, but the information is not yet totally clear and I'm sure we'll know more later in the week. For now, all that matters is that she is on the way back to Vietnam.

The Blue Dragon Rescue Team has been in contact with Quy via text messaging for several weeks, but the case was brought to a head about a week ago and Quy needed to escape her situation. She ended up in a police station, where she has been until today.

It will be a few more days until Quy is back to Vietnam, and some more days still before she sees her family again. Once she's OK, we know of another 13 year old girl trafficked into China who needs our help, so the team may be back on the road even before the week is out.

To some it may seem like a lot of effort to help just one child. Apart from the fact that our rescues also result in trafficking rings being arrested - and thereby prevent future trafficking from taking place - I have to say that travelling a 4000km round trip to save a child's life is a worthy mission in itself. None of us would hesitate if it was our own child.

Rescue work is a long haul, both chronologically and geographically. When the moment comes that Quy is back in the arms of her mother and father, there will be no question that this has been worthwhile.

www.bluedragon.org

Momentum

Blue Dragon's Street Outreach team meets new homeless children in Hanoi every week, and sometimes every day.

Kids come to the city for a great variety of reasons: neglect and abuse at home... a fight at school... poverty and hunger... or maybe just a search for adventure.

They're drawn to Hanoi in the hope of a better life, but in reality the city is a dangerous place for homeless children. We've now come to the conclusion that every child, boy and girl, who comes to the city as a 'street kid' is either sexually abused or at the very least approached by a pedophile offering money in return for sex.

One day last summer I met two boys, aged 13 and 14, who had come to the city looking for a summer job. They spent only one night on the street but were approached by 6 pedophiles. By the next morning, they were terrified and just wanted to go home.

How has this situation developed in a conservative capital city where tradition and family values reign supreme?

A very large part of the problem is that Vietnamese laws on child protection have been written in such a way that definitions of sexual abuse apply only to girls. In short, boys are not protected from sexual abuse by the law.

Over the past two years, the number of boys we have met on the streets who have been abused by pedophiles has grown, and continued to grow. We've worked closely with police to turn this situation around, but have only seen 2 of these men arrested.

However, there's some good news on the horizon: there is a building momentum to revise the law so that the abuse of both girls and boys is considered a criminal offense.

On Friday last week, Blue Dragon Children's Foundation and the People's Police Academy led a workshop that brought together police, lawmakers, academics, and officials. The single topic of discussion was the need to reform those articles of the criminal code which apply only to females, but should apply equally to males.

Research papers were presented, professional experience discussed, anecdotes shared, and ideas were exchanged.

During a break, one senior policeman approached me to say that we had met before. I couldn't recall how or where, until he told me the story.

Back in 2007, his own nephew had run away from home in the countryside and come to Hanoi. We had met him and taken him in, and as is our usual way of working he stayed in our care some days until he revealed to us where he was from. When we contacted his parents, this policeman came to our centre to pick him up.

The encounter was a poignant reminder that the children in danger of abuse are not only stereotypical street kids from broken families; they are any kids at all, no matter what kind of family or background they are from.

Everybody agrees that the law needs to change. It's now just a matter of when.

www.bluedragon.org

Farewell, young Quoc

Today I share the sad news of the passing of a little boy named Quoc.

Quoc was 12 years old and living in rural Bac Ninh province, 2 hours north of Hanoi. He had a difficult life, growing up in poverty with a very ill mother. Quoc appeared to be a normal, healthy child but he had suffered a brain aneurysm in Grade 2 and never fully recovered.

He passed away in a local hospital having had a stroke in his sleep.

Despite his poor health and difficult family circumstances, Quoc did well at school, even receiving certificates of excellence for his studies, and he loved football. He was studying Grade 7 with support from Blue Dragon Children's Foundation, dreaming of a better life ahead.

There is always an inherent sense of unfairness when a child dies, in any circumstance. Knowing of Quoc's hard life and sudden death, it's impossible to not feel sorrow and grief; he had so much ahead, and was determined to make the most of his life.

But equally, Quoc's life was not in vain. He did make the most of his short years, caring for his little brother and his parents, and enjoying every moment. He didn't live with self pity, and he didn't use his difficulties as an excuse for not trying.

So we say farewell to our little brother, and we grieve his passing, but we remember the good he brought to our world and will let our happier memories of his life be his legacy.

Farewell, young Quoc.

www.bluedragon.org

Safe / not safe

After 3 weeks on the road in Australia, it's great to be back in Vietnam, back at home, and catching up with everyone and everything.

One of those 'things' that I have been catching up: the last few episodes of The Walking Dead.

For those who don't watch the show (seriously? There are people who don't watch TWD!?), our rugged band of zombie apocalypse survivors has been lurching from disaster to disaster, losing friends and sustaining plenty of damage along the way. But now they have made it to the safest and most peaceful place they have yet been: Alexandria.

They have high walls to keep them safe; electricity; dinner parties; cookies; rocking chairs on porches.

And it's driving them all insane.

Never in all 5 seasons of the show have they been this safe, and yet they are now divided against each other and acting completely irrationally.

Any psychologist would quickly put a label on this: PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder.

I, meantime, am watching this and thinking how much it all reminds me of many kids here at Blue Dragon.

When we first meet children, they are normally in the midst of a crisis. They might be locked into a brothel in China; or caught up in a pedophile ring in Hanoi; or trapped in a sweatshop in Ho Chi Minh City.

They may have been in this situation for weeks, or months, or years. They may have survived by adapting to a violent and hostile environment, or by learning to manipulate people around them as a defence mechanism. They may have become violent themselves.

When they finally can escape their crisis, that doesn't mean everything is fine now. Just because they are in a safe place doesn't automatically mean their problems are over.

At Blue Dragon, we see young people deal with their trauma in many different ways, and we are extremely fortunate to have two outstanding Vietnamese Psychologists working with us. Just recently I wrote about the incredible resilience we see in the young people we encounter; but of course not all of the Blue Dragon kids make quick recoveries.

For the kids we meet who have been through particularly tough times, such as sexual abuse, it's normal to see them struggle for up to a year: they'll stay with Blue Dragon for a while, then regress and go back to the streets before coming in again. Sometimes they repeat this several times before calming down.

Going back to school is particularly hard for many. Sitting in a room with strangers who have never been through the same life experiences; listening to a teacher who knows nothing of the horrors they have faced; learning about subjects that seem so abstract and useless against the recurring nightmares.

Anyone who has suffered through ongoing trauma can have a whole range of symptoms of stress that live on with them long after the crisis is over. A scent or sound can bring back a forgotten moment of terror. An innocent question or comment can result in sudden anger. Often there is no rhyme or reason to the way they will react to their new surrounds.

Healing is a process that needs time, professional help, and care. And then some more time.

Leaving behind the crisis is not the end of trauma. The scars to be dealt with are often invisible, but they are real.

As The Walking Dead reminds us, getting to a safe place is only the start of healing; the journey to real safety goes on much longer.

www.bluedragon.org

News Roundup: March 2015

An occasional roundup of news stories about the issues impacting kids in Vietnam and around the world. This month, slavery has received significant media attention.

- Babies are advertised for sale online in China...

- ... and a film maker reflects on his own experience of human trafficking there.

- The rescue of a Vietnamese woman trafficked to China is described in this report.

- A British crackdown on human trafficking leads to the discovery of young Vietnamese women trafficked into beauty parlours.

- The Modern Slavery Bill is close to being passed as law in the UK.

- Cambodia continues to struggle with trafficking for forced labour and the sex trade.

- The Economist takes a look at slavery in supply chains.

- And this article explores the use of slavery in the fishing industry.

www.bluedragon.org

Comeback

"Hong" grew up in a small town on a high mountain in north-west Vietnam. She had never travelled far from home until the day one of her friends - a woman who lived just down the road - told her about a high-paying job as a mushroom farmer in China.

Hong was excited to have a job opportunity for the first time in her life. But much to her horror, there was no farming job at all: her "friend" had arranged to sell her to a Chinese family, where both the father and the son used her as their bride.

As difficult and terrifying as this life was for Hong, she succumbed to it until something even worse happened. She fell pregnant to one of the 2 men, and the family announced that they wanted her to abort the unborn child.

After all the pain and anguish that Hong had been through, this was too much; she decided that she wanted to have this baby, that her son or daughter should have a chance at life. In desperation, Hong cried out for help; the Blue Dragon Rescue Team went in to China, found Hong, and brought her home.

"Tuan" grew up in very different circumstances, but also with great hardship. He's now just 14 years old, but was orphaned as a child, grew up in central Vietnam in extreme poverty, and in 2013 went to work over 600km from home in a factory. He went because he thought he had no other choice.

Life was bleak at home, but it was worse in the factory, where he worked up to 18 hours a day in dreadful conditions. But then in 2014, Blue Dragon visited the factory where Tuan was working, learned his story, and brought him home.


How do young people like Tuan and Hong ever get their lives back on track? Is it even realistic to think that they might have a normal life again after experiences like these?

In all the time I have been in Vietnam, one of the constant surprises has been the resilience of the young people we meet. Despite the extraordinary hardships that they may be in at the time we first encounter them, many of the girls and boys make the most unlikely comebacks, and find a way to carry on with life.

Hong is living in her village once again, and is now the proud mother of a little boy. Her son, conceived in the worst of circumstances, has the most loving mother that any child could have. Blue Dragon has just built a house for Hong, as her own house was in great disrepair, and we are in contact with her just about every week. She's working from home, thanks to an inexpensive sewing machine, and has the support of her community. A visitor to her village would never guess the horror that Hong has lived through.

And young Tuan is also back on track. He's in Grade 5 now, living back in his village with an aunty, and he tells us that he loves studying art, IT and English. A couple of  weeks ago, he received a certificate from his provincial government for his graphic design work. How amazing is that!

Not every young person like Tuan or Hong is able to make such a comeback - some take many years to repair the damage that has been done to them, and some might never fully recover. But there is hope, strong hope, that kids who have been through the worst of the worst can still turn their lives around.

And if there is hope, then aren't we obliged to give them that chance?

www.bluedragon.org

What can be done

Just a month ago, I wrote about my own sense of despair in some of the situations that Blue Dragon faces with street kids in Vietnam: in particular, the aggressive pedophile rings that are targeting homeless boys in the cities.

The last couple of weeks, though, have been greatly encouraging.

Our success in several significant rescues is a terrific sign that it's all worthwhile. First we brought back a 16 year old boy from a 'massage parlour'; then we stopped 4 buses taking a total of 56 ethnic minority people to be sold into slavery across the border; and then we rescued a 7 year old girl who had been kidnapped - the first time we have come across such a case.

In each of these cases, the traffickers have been identified and arrested. That translates to a whole lot of future trafficking victims who are now safe.

I'm in Australia at the moment, here to attend several important events including a trivia night in Sydney and a major function in Melbourne organised by Roll'd, the Vietnamese food chain. Both of these events - and another coming up in Brisbane on Friday March 27 - are to raise money for Blue Dragon's work in Vietnam. The Roll'd event last week had the specific goal of funding the construction of a boarding home in remote Dien Bien province, so that rural ethnic minority kids have somewhere to live while they study and don't have to drop out of school. (Roll'd will be raising more money for this at their outlets during May - stay tuned!)

All of this helps me to remember that, as terrible as things can be, there is always hope. It would be easy to feel overwhelmed by all the trafficking cases in Vietnam and around the region: in reality, there is so much human trafficking that nobody has any idea of how widespread the problem is.

But the events of these past few weeks serve as a reminder of what can be done. We don't have to sit back and accept these terrible events and situations. There really is something we can do, if only we make the effort.

www.bluedragon.org

Kidnapped, aged 7

7 year old "Thi" has had a terrifying 2 weeks.

Thi is a H'mong girl from Dien Bien province; her home is a tiny village, nearby the one pictured below, way off the beaten track in the mountains close to China.

A village in the commune from which Thi was taken

Two weeks ago, Thi was playing in the fields when a friendly neighbour approached her with sweets. Thi knew the woman well; she lived just a few houses away and was well known in the village.

But the neighbour had been offered money to kidnap a girl and take her into China, where a H'mong Chinese family was waiting. Many details are yet to be revealed: we don't yet know how much money she was sold for, or what the family intended to do with this girl.

News of the kidnap only reached us on Monday afternoon; the family lives far from police and, with no formal education, didn't know what to do. But by Tuesday morning we had a plan in place, and late on Tuesday the girl was back in Vietnam with us.

Working with police, we set a trap in which we pretended to buy back the child. There are some details we can't yet disclose, as more arrests will be made, but the trafficker from the village is already in custody.

And most importantly: Thi is home.

She arrived back in her family home in the early hours of this morning, for an extremely emotional reunion.

Thi walking home with her father

This case may be our most important yet: so much was at stake, and the delay of 2 weeks before any action was taken reduced our chances of bring little Thi home.

We're all glad to have brought Thi back; but we are nowhere near as pleased as her family is. As for Thi herself, she's exhausted and frightened, and still doesn't understand much of what has happened. Hopefully she doesn't realise how badly this story could have ended.

www.bluedragon.org

The note

Usually when we talk about Vietnamese kids being trafficked to China, we're talking about girls and young women who have been taken by deception and sold to brothels or into forced marriages.

But today we dealt with a totally new situation that we have never seen before: a Vietnamese boy who appears to have been trafficked into China for sex.

Some details are still unclear, but what we know is this:

Sixteen year old Sung is an ethnic minority boy from northern Vietnam. Until last week, he had never been more than 20km from his village in the mountains; he had never seen a city or the sea. But some people came to visit his village and talked about the great job opportunities that lay just over the mountain. Dreaming of adventure, Sung and 6 other males from his village went along.

Sung is a bright boy studying in Grade 10; he can speak a little English and gets good results at school. But he had no idea that he was being taken to China, and once he got there he was shocked to realise how far he was from home.

He and another boy were taken to work in the city, while the older males were told that they would go to work in a forest.

Sung and his friend were - apparently - taken to a male massage parlour. I say 'apparently' because Sung is so innocent to the world that he doesn't even know the Vietnamese word for 'massage'. He hasn't yet told us the full story, but he says that what he saw there terrified him, and within a day he had found a way to escape.

Not knowing where he was, Sung walked for 2 days through China. With no money or food, he was increasingly fearful and desperate. Nobody could understand him, so he found a notepad and pen and wrote out his message in Vietnamese and English:

I am Vietnamese
I [want to] go to Vietnam
My name is Sung
I am 17* year old

Sung then approached a friendly-looking Chinese woman on the street and handed her the note. She took him to the police, who called their superiors, who in turn called Blue Dragon Children's Foundation in Vietnam.

Today we travelled in to China to meet Sung and bring him home. The team has just crossed back in to Vietnam, and we hope to have Sung back with his family by Saturday night.

Sung is furiously hungry, and thrilled to be safe. He needs some time to think about what he has been through, and we are confident he will tell us in his own time, but it does seem that he is physically unharmed.

While we are not certain that Sung was being trafficked for sex, there is no other likely explanation for what has happened. This is a disturbing development, if true, and will add another layer of complexity to the fight against human trafficking. It also means that we need to find his friends as soon as possible; for that we will work with the Chinese police.

Sung has been through a terrible ordeal, and may take some time to recover from this experience.
The one saving grace is knowing how far, far worse this could have turned out for this boy.

* While Sung says he is 17, he is still only 16. Vietnamese people often calculate their age with an extra year.

Home and safe

Lots of great news from Blue Dragon this week. 

 

Followers on Facebook will know that we had 2 separate breakthroughs in the fight against human trafficking. A tip-off from a community member in Dien Bien province - a remote area in north-west Vietnam - alerted us to a major trafficking ring planning to take 100 people to China.

 

The plan was to take them in smaller groups, and the first of those groups set out on Thursday with 27 people. They were all ethnic minority citizens, as young as 15 and up to about 30 years old; both males and females. and all believed they were going to well paying jobs. In fact they were to be sold as slave labour to illegal factories and brothels, where they would be held indefinitely. The traffickers were to be paid $10,000 for this shipment of human cargo.

 

Blue Dragon passed info on to the police and then coordinated with them to stop the bus long before it got to the border. The traffickers are now in custody and their 27 victims are safely home, still shocked by what happened.

 

But the ring was not deterred. Their second contingent still thought it could get away with taking more people on Sunday. This time they were much more prepared: they spread misinformation about their route, they took the mobile phones off all the people once they were on board the private bus, and they changed vehicles along the way. What they didn't know was that one of their victims was in contact with Blue Dragon the whole time - someone who knew exactly what was going on.

 

 

 

The mini-van used to traffic 16 ethnic minority people to China on Sunday

 

 

This time, we followed the bus with 16 victims to the border and waited for the traffickers to try to cross. By working this way, the police will be able to lay much heavier charges against the trafficking ring. And so we followed the bus all the way to the border with China, at which time Vietnamese police were able to stop them and arrest the traffickers. They could not believe their bad luck - they were so confident that they had done everything to stay undetected.

 

Their arrest revealed critical new information: 2 more buses were also heading to the border, with a total of 17 more victims from another province. These traffickers were in the process of taking not 16, but 33 people who would be sold as slave labourers and sex workers in China.

 

The 33 victims are tonight with police, and will start heading back to their homes tomorrow. We clearly have a lot of work to do in these communities educating people about taking up 'unbelievably good' job offers far from home. The people in these remote regions often have very low levels of education and can be desperate for chances to earn money; they are easy to deceive. Believing that they were going as a group gave them a false confidence; and of course they all had their mobile phones with them, so thought they could call for help if needed.

 

All 56 people are now safe, and we hope they will share the lesson they have learnt with their communities. Surely the trafficking ring has been brought to its knees now.

 

 

Meantime in Hanoi, Blue Dragon's Street Outreach team has also been busy meeting homeless children. We find that they come to the city for many different reasons, including poverty at home or violence within the family. One young guy, "Tung", turned up in Hanoi about a week ago. Tung is 15 years old, and we could see straight away that he's a really good kid. He had come to Hanoi to earn money to help his mother, but found himself sleeping rough and being approached by the gangs and pimps who target the city's homeless boys.

 

Tung stayed out of trouble, though, and we met him early in the week. He was too shy at first to tell us about himself; he feared he would get in trouble at home, as he had left without telling anyone what he was doing. By the weekend, Tung agreed for us to contact his parents, and his mother came in to the city on Sunday to meet us and bring her son home. Mum was worried sick, and so deeply relieved to have her son back. Tung is happy, too, and will be back at school on Monday. (Turns out he is in a class for gifted students).

 

Tung (not his real name) and his mother at Dragon House in Hanoi

Despite the many difficult situations we encounter, it's great to see that we can still help kids to turn things around. Street kids and victims of human trafficking alike face terrible dangers. But for all the bad that happens, there's always hope for a happy ending.

Shining

Following a fairly quiet week at Blue Dragon, we've had an eventful weekend.

Since Friday evening, we've been inundated with problems: a gang of pimps twice attacking kids from our shelters, an Asian sex tourist ring targeting underage boys we know, and on and on. So much so that I'm looking forward to Monday morning to put the weekend's headaches behind us!

But through this series of incidents, we've also seen some of the Blue Dragon kids show incredible courage and empathy.

Close to midnight on Friday, one of the boys in our care - "Son" - received a message from a girl he knows. She was terrified: some men had apparently abducted her and a friend, and they were locked into a room somewhere in Hanoi. As far as we know, the building was a brothel and the girls were being trafficked. They had no idea where they were or what was going to happen, but were able to use a smartphone to send messages through Facebook.

Son alerted our staff, who started communicating with the girls, but they suddenly went silent - we suspect the abductors had come back. We had pretty much no information at all that would enable us to find the girls, so our next step was to contact their families... but we didn't know who they were.

At this point, Son, who is only 17 years old, offered to help. He got on his bicycle and rode around the city to find other friends of the girls who knew where they lived, and then went to their homes to let them know what was happening. The families were in a panic, but they had an idea of who might have been behind the abduction. We don't know yet what they did, but by Saturday morning the two girls were safely home. Hopefully by the end of Monday we will have the full story.

If Son had not responded to his friends' message, or gone to find their families, we don't know what would have become of the two girls - but we can certainly imagine. It was close to 2am before Son finished and returned home, and because of his intervention the girls are now safe.

Later in the weekend, another of the Blue Dragon kids stood up for a friend in need. A former street kid named "Tu" has been living at home in the countryside but had some trouble with his family, and not knowing what to do he returned to Hanoi. Tu didn't want to tell us because he's a shy kid and fiercely independent - he wanted to work this out on his own.

But one of the Blue Dragon boys, "Nam," found out what was happening and went straight to the Long Bien Bridge, where Tu was hanging out in an internet café, to make sure he was safe. Nam encouraged Tu to come back to Blue Dragon's Outreach House; and although he was reluctant initially, Nam convinced him and they went back together to stay there for the night. Our Social Workers are involved now, and we hope to help Tu sort out the problem with his family in coming days.

If not for Nam's concern for his friend, Tu would have spent the night on the streets; and we know that homeless kids are extremely vulnerable to predators at the moment. Nam's intervention may have saved his friend from a pretty awful fate.

The Blue Dragon kids aren't always angels, but we see some outstanding leadership and compassion from many of them, both boys and girls. My team and I share a belief that caring for others is always worthwhile, and seeing the kids we help follow in our footsteps is a heart warming experience.

Most of the kids we meet have had terrible life experiences - that's why they come to Blue Dragon. For them to have an opportunity to do something good, and to really shine, is both a major step in their recovery and a wonderful opportunity for them to show that they are much more than just victims of circumstance.

News Roundup: February 2015

An occasional roundup of news stories about the issues impacting kids in Vietnam and around the world.

- The UK continues to struggle with the issue of Vietnamese children being trafficked in to the country to work in cannabis factories.

- Moving on from 'awareness raising', Thai citizens take anti-trafficking into their own hands.

- China rescued 43,000 victims of trafficking last year...

- ... but bride trafficking to China won't be stopping any time soon.

- An academic study has been released on the health impact of trafficking for forced labour (and here's a newspaper article about it).

- Child abuse caught on camera at a Vietnamese orphanage.

- Could there be links between climate change and child slavery?

The year of (not) winning

The Year of the Goat has begun; and I for one am glad that the Year of the Horse is behind us.

At the start of 2014, I quietly decided that it was to be the Year of Winning. Readers of this blog will know that in the past couple of years Blue Dragon has been increasingly struggling with the issue of pedophiles in Hanoi exploiting street boys.

Pretty much every single boy who turns up in the city, escaping fractured families or poverty in the countryside, is met by a pedophile or one of their pimps within hours of arriving. Some of these men have deliberately targeted children who are at Blue Dragon and other charities, while most just hang around in the parks and internet cafes where homeless children tend to gather. Increasingly they are using social media to trawl for vulnerable children, meaning that their reach is close to limitless.

A year ago I determined that 2014 was to be the year that we got on top of the issue here in Hanoi and brought it back under control. I really believed that we could.

But we didn't. We didn't win.

At times we felt that we were incredibly close. At times we were sure we couldn't fail. But the year has passed, and the problem remains.

Kids who are caught up in this horrible trade are deeply confused and tormented; they want to escape the cycle of abuse but are steeped in shame at what is happening to them. They want to accept our help, but don't believe in themselves and don't think they are worthy of our kindness. Many act in self-destructive ways and take to using methamphetamines; the underlying problem is that they hate themselves and believe they deserve nothing good.

Even now, there are boys in Blue Dragon who only recently left the streets and are still being approached - in person and through Facebook - by the pimps and pedophiles who want to exploit them. It's unbelievably hard for the kids to be trying to move on with their lives, while their exploiters live just hundreds of metres away, in some cases.

And then there are the kids who gave in, who went with the abusers thinking they would make some quick money and then be done with it or were duped into going back to someone's house to sleep and ended up being raped. Ashamed and humiliated, they disappeared into Hanoi's seedy underbelly and gave up their hopes and dreams for the future. These are kids as young as 13 years old.

I wanted us to defeat these abusers so that we could protect the children, but at times it feels like everything is lost. Even now, there is a terrible frustration in knowing who these abusers are and not being able to stop them.

And yet, we have had some beautiful victories along the way. Many kids who were ensnared in the pedophile rings broke free and have settled into our shelters and homes, or returned to their own families. Some took months to calm down and start leading a stable life; some are yet to fully make the transition. Each has been through a tremendous inner struggle, so watching them transform into happy, smiling teens has been an amazing experience.

We've had great success, too, in starting to win support from local officials and police. Until now, this problem has been completely unknown in Hanoi. Indeed, many people appear shocked when we raise with them the issue of boys being sexually abused. But every single official we have approached and spoken to has expressed support and agreed that things have to change.

The great challenge is that Vietnamese law currently does not recognise that boys can be the victims of sexual abuse. In March, when our work resulted in the arrest of one of Hanoi's serial pedophiles, the man was charged with indecency, rather than sexual abuse, and so received a relatively light sentence (4 years) compared to his horrific crimes.

We've embarked on a plan to have that law revised, possibly within the first half of this year. We are working with police, the National Assembly, and the media to enable them to see the issue up close, as we do. And most importantly, we have put every last drop of our energy into caring for the kids who have been impacted by this abuse. At times it has been massively draining and seemingly futile, but it is with the individual kids that we have had both the greatest joys of success and the greatest sorrows of failure.

So we did not win, as I had hoped, but neither have we lost. We've made progress, and are even more determined - and knowledgeable - than a year ago. The men who exploit street kids might think they can get away with this forever, but they're wrong.

One of my greatest fictional heroes is Mulder from the X-Files, who failed repeatedly but persisted because he believed in his cause. One episode finished with him laying in a hospital bed barely alive, after a long journey in his attempt to save the world. When he awoke, his partner Scully asked: "Did you find what you were looking for?"

His answer: "No, but I found something else. The faith to keep looking."

2014 was not the Year of Winning. But as the Year of the Goat kicks off, I will not give up hope that Vietnamese kids can be protected and safe, as all kids deserve to be.

The announcement

It's time for a change.

For over 12 years now, I have been running Blue Dragon in Vietnam. I've never been alone in this: the struggles, joys and challenges have always been shared among a team. That team has grown over the years, as has the scope and impact of our work.

In the earliest days our work was with street boys in Hanoi who were mostly economic migrants to the city.

Today we rescue girls trafficked into China for sale to brothels or as brides; we bring them home and make sure their traffickers are caught. We find kids trafficked to sweatshops, and we believe we are close to extinguishing the use of child labour in garment factories. We send about 1500 children to school, and another 70 to university.

And we continue to work with Hanoi's street kids, although these days they face very different problems. In addition to homelessness and lack of opportunity, they are targets for sexual predators on a scale that continues to shock us. Vietnamese law does not include males in its definition of victims of sexual abuse, so the abusers have so far been difficult to catch and prosecute. We're working on changing that law, and momentum is building.

We've done much, and much remains to be done. 

However, my role in all this is changing. If you're on the mailing list, you will know by now the news: I am stepping aside as CEO. Once lunar new year rolls around, late this week, I will no longer be the boss. I can see that Blue Dragon needs somebody new, somebody better able to manage and administer the day to day running of what is now a significant organisation.

Blue Dragon is not only my job. It's my family and my life. There are people whose lives I have changed; and many more who have changed mine. There are people I gave hope to when all seemed lost, and people who stood by me when I thought I had lost my own hope. There are so many special - profound - connections that I can't imagine that I will ever be able to leave.

So I am not walking away from Blue Dragon, and not looking for a new job. I'm simply hanging up the CEO hat and continuing on in the role of Founder, with a capital "F". Rather than running the organisation and calling all the shots, I will be working on special projects alongside the team. My work in anti-trafficking and crisis management will be increasing. I'll be mentoring staff and developing leadership among the kids. I'll be finding ways for Blue Dragon to grow without compromising our philosophy of caring for the kids as individuals. With a bit of luck, I might even have more time to write my blog.

While I can write about this objectively now, getting to this point has taken many months and has sometimes been an emotional affair. It certainly hasn't been easy to take this step. What has enabled it, though, is the amazing team at Blue Dragon, who have supported my decision completely.

Our incoming CEO, Julienne Carey, has risen through the ranks of the organisation. She started as a volunteer; took on the role of  Communications and Fundraising Manager; and then became Deputy CEO. The Blue Dragon staff know and respect her, and see this move as a natural next step. Nobody has expressed surprise that Julienne is taking on the leadership role. For both Julienne and I, it is enormously reassuring to know that we have the full support of the staff, some of whom have been with Blue Dragon since before we were even officially an organisation.

When I first moved to Vietnam, I joked that I was coming here to retire. Aged 28, I had left my job in Australia, sold or given away everything I owned, and was in search of the simple life. I utterly failed at that - creating and running Blue Dragon has been anything but simple - and now I am again at the point of making a major change.

This new move also won't be retirement. I suspect things aren't going to get much simpler, either. But I do hope that now I can be more focused, have more time to think and to breathe, and achieve even more for the people I care most about: the kids and staff of Blue Dragon Children's Foundation.

Ten

The Blue Dragon kids celebrated a terrific milestone last week: the 10th annual Tet Awards.

Every year, for the last 10 years, we've held a ceremony to mark the end of the lunar calendar, and welcome the coming year. The original idea was to give each child a chance to stand in the spotlight and shine, and 10 years later that's still what we do. These days there are about 500 kids joining in, so it's a bit bigger than when we started and even more fun!

So here are 10 things I loved about the 10th annual Tet Awards.

1. The kids had a chance to shine - and that's what they did. They organised their own performances. They sang and danced. They MCed the night. Everybody left the event feeling proud.

2. Children who have been with us just a few weeks were there, along with kids we met more than 10 years ago. It was like a massive family reunion, and everybody had a smile or hug to share.

3. Local businesses pitched in. Accor Hotels made sure we had cookies for everyone. Ecopark donated money for the food. Don's Bistro sent along a staff team to help with food preparation for the entire day! People were really generous to make sure the kids had a great night.

4. Looking at the joy in the kids' faces, nobody could imagine the hardships they have endured. There were kids who got up and sang, or received awards on the stage, who just a year ago were living through the most horrific experiences. Seeing how they have bounced back and embraced their second chance at life is profoundly inspiring.

5. There were teens performing hip hop to rap songs, kids acting out comedies, and little children dressed as fairies singing "happy birthday"... and the whole crowd loved all of it.

6. 500 kids packed into the hall. All are from disadvantaged and troubled backgrounds, but there was not a single moment of bad behaviour as the stereotypes would have you believe.

7. Everyone wanted to take a photo! A few days after the event, the kids' Facebook pages are still buzzing with their memories and pictures of the night.

8. Kids who are blind, or deaf, or have any type of physical or intellectual disability joined right in along side kids without any disability. There was not an ounce of discrimination.

9. Volunteers pitched in to make everything perfect. Friends from around Hanoi came to take the photos, serve food, set up the hall, and paint the kids' faces. Nobody expected to be thanked; they just wanted to make it a great night for the kids.

10. And the Blue Dragon staff came out in force once again. They spent weeks getting ready - in fact preparation started in December. Not a murmur of complaint from anyone... and not a single person failed to lend a hand. Everyone, from the social workers to the cleaners to the driver, worked together to make this a special event.

A ten-year anniversary is an important occasion. The kids had a great night, but in truth so did all of us. I say this every year, but I think this may have been our best Tet Awards yet!

Wedding season

It's wedding season in Vietnam; the moon and custom dictates that this is a good time of year to marry, and so throughout the land couples are getting hitched everywhere you turn.

Blue Dragon has not been immune to the buzz. Two of our 'old boys' have married in recent weeks; both young men who once needed help to get out of poverty but who now are doing tremendously well for themselves. One runs a mobile phone shop, and one works at Blue Dragon helping street kids.

I love going to Vietnamese weddings, and yet would dread to have my own. As a guest, the wedding is a simple party: you turn up and eat, then leave. No fuss about buying wedding gifts, either; you just put some money in an envelope and drop it in the box on the way in.

For the couple getting married, it's another story. Months of hard work to meet cultural and social obligations, and in the end many of the decisions about how the day goes fall into the hands of elderly relatives and fortune tellers. There's an endearingly perverse sense of controlled randomness about how everything is going to work.

As a foreigner, attending a Vietnamese wedding can vary between bewildering and hilarious. At one of the recent weddings, Blue Dragon's DJ boy Bao Bao played electronic music for a hugely energetic crowd of young adults - all under the watchful eyes of Joseph and Mary and their baby Jesus. Rather a contrasting set of images, which absolutely nobody cared about.

At another wedding, the singer was a local guy who performed a song which was meant to be sung by a male and female duet. But not to worry: he simply switched to a high-pitch to sing the female lines! It was so bizarre and unexpected that we couldn't help roaring with laughter. I couldn't shake the memory of the puppets from Sifl and Olly - watch at your own peril.

Despite all the wacky "what on earth!?" moments, there has also been something deeply moving about these weddings. Every time one of the older boys or girls from Blue Dragon gets married, the event turns into a massive reunion at which kids and staff, both current and former, all get together to celebrate.

Young men and women who once worked on the streets of the city or were trafficked against their will but are now leading independent lives turn up, and it's as though no time at all has passed since we last met. Even those who got themselves into trouble, or left Blue Dragon to return to the streets, join in and there's no judgement or awkwardness: we're all united in celebration.

In the case of our staff member recently marrying, so many kids attended that we needed 2 buses to get them all there!

As an organisation, we often talk about ourselves as a family; and these occasions confirm that yes, we are more than just a legal entity with staff and policies. Blue Dragon really is something special.

As abruptly as it started, wedding season will soon end. I can't wait for the next round of marriages, and for all the get-togethers with kids new and old.

News roundup: January 2015

The first in an occasional roundup of news stories about the issues impacting kids in Vietnam and around the world

- Central Vietnam is being targeted by human traffickers

- Vietnamese police arrest two men for selling child abuse images online (Vietnamese only)

- The Australian government considers allowing adoptions from Vietnam; not everyone thinks it's a good idea

- The Guardian explores child labour in global supply chains

- A Chinese court gives the death sentence to the leader of a Vietnam-China child trafficking ring

- Ten lessons from a discussion on ending child labour

- And a discussion from the US in HuffPo on why 'child prostitution' is a misnomer

Journeys

My stories on this blog and on the Blue Dragon Facebook are often about the journeys taken by Vietnamese youth, particularly trafficked children returning home and runaway boys being reunited with families.

Indeed, last week saw the Blue Dragon team bringing 7 teenage girls back from China, where they had been sold into the sex industry, and accompanying a 14 year old boy home to his family in the countryside after he had run away and spent several nights on the streets of Hanoi.

Since we began back in 2003, we've walked with Vietnamese kids on thousands of journeys. Some have been simple: re-enrolling in school or a trip to a doctor. Others have been long and complex journeys: escaping from systemic abuse or facing terrifying ordeals. And not all journeys end well.

During these last 2 years, many of our journeys have been dark and painful. We are receiving ever more calls for help from Vietnamese girls who have been deceived by apparent friends, employers, and lovers, only to be sold into brothels or forced marriages in China. The psychological damage is inevitably deep and lasting; and too often the girls suffer serious physical harm as well.

And in Hanoi, where Blue Dragon's HQ and children's centre is based, too much of our work is in healing boys who have been entrapped in pedophile rings which prey upon homeless children.

All of these journeys have been filled with sorrow and despair.

We continue this work, however, believing that we can have an impact. When we rescue a girl from a Chinese brothel, we are changing her life forever and also shutting down an entire trafficking ring which could otherwise traffic another 5, 10, 50 girls.

Our work with boys in Hanoi is also aiming toward lasting change. Vietnamese law currently does not acknowledge that males can be victims of sexual abuse, and so the pedophiles feel that they are safe in their exploitation. We plan to turn that around: there are loopholes under which they can be arrested, and we are looking at how this law can be revised to outlaw the abuse of boys.

In the coming Year of the Goat, I know that many difficult journeys lay ahead. As Vietnam develops, its youth face increasingly complex social issues, and the vulnerability of the poor seems to be spiraling out of control. The exploitation that we see is growing worse every year, both in nature and in incidence.

But we will continue, because giving up is not an option. Every setback is only a lesson to prepare us for the next step of the journey.

Whatever happened to the Blue Dragon blog..?

It's been a month since I have been active on my blog. Time to admit that I have been very slack!

There's been a lot happening here in Vietnam over Christmas and new year, with rescues and police operations as well as the less visible but equally important growth among the Blue Dragon kids day by day. Much of our work in recent months has been focused on intervening in crises of all kinds: from kids being attacked on the streets to pedophiles luring children away from us over Facebook to girls being sold into brothels in China.

My lack of writing doesn't reflect a lack of action - quite the reverse! But I need to start getting literate again. No excuses!

This year my blog will take on a new shape, but I am still planning things out. For now: I will get back to writing each Monday, and continuing to shares stories from the streets of Vietnam. Sign up to get new posts delivered straight to your email!