A Game of Thirds

After we rumbled down the dirt road and past the wooden houses on stilts at the shoreline, we came to an opening, a dock of sorts. There, we walked over deeply-cracked mud and boarded a longboat that would take us to the other side of the slow-moving Mekong.

Barges with homes built upon them were anchored close to the shore; just a few feet away from Cambodian soil, but a whole culture apart. Different language and customs. Common problems.

The motor’s rhythm was labored and irregular, but it was enough to propel us by this first cluster of refugees and illegal immigrants and across the dirty expanse to the opposite bank. There, we docked at a floating church that was running a school for children, many of them orphaned or abandoned.

Current estimates of the Vietnamese community in Cambodia range from 100,000 to over 2 million. Citizens of neither Cambodia nor Vietnam, many live on the lakes and rivers in flotillas, waterborne villages huddled together for protection and community.

We boarded the church where thirty or so children were diligently studying at rows of desks as part of a program funded by our hosts. The gentle rocking of the mobile vessel spoke of the villagers’ precarious position, caught in a land of prejudice, discrimination and persecution, but unwelcome back in the socialist land of their heritage lest they spark a counter-revolution.

To be Vietnamese in Cambodia, especially as one engaged in subsistence life on the lake or river, is to be a ‘yuon,’ a person regarded by most Cambodians as ‘lower than scum.’ Widely resented, these poor fishermen are frequent targets of political power plays and hate crimes. Various purges and sporadic attacks have brought death to them and their families, including the massacre of children in a floating video game parlor. Viewed as intruders, stealers of fish, and polluters of waterways, they are unwelcome guests in a culture where many seek to eradicate or expel them.

Lack of citizenship privileges, restricted access to basic education, social exclusion, illiteracy, limited trade skill opportunities, strong obligations to paying family debt, and extreme poverty all work together to attract the wolves. It’s no wonder that the children of these displaced Vietnamese communities are constantly preyed upon by traffickers.

The net result is a horrible game of thirds...

Over one-third of the 60,000 to 100,000 full and part-time prostitutes in Cambodia are under 18 and most are Vietnamese girls, many stolen or hoaxed into sexual slavery. The impoverished Vietnamese boat people are so desperate for income that one third of the families have willingly sold a child to sex traffickers in order to survive. Another one third has seriously considered doing so.

I scanned the children in rows before me and looked at every third child.

How many of them might be sold?

If not for this church-based education program, how many of them would already be in brothels by now?