SPEECHLESS

In this week’s story, a Cambodian girl finds herself utterly “speechless”: no one listens to her pleas for mercy, no one ever responds to her cries for help, and absolutely no one cares about her rights to freedom and respect as a human being.

Speechless: By Heidi Isaza, February 2010

Cambodia

“My parents were so poor. When I was young, we didn’t even have a house. [We] used to sleep on the street sometimes. Sometimes I slept under the pergola. Sometimes I slept by a nearby grave,” she remembered.

Ka is one of four children. Instead of starting school at age 5, like other children, she started helping her siblings scavenge for cans and other waste that could be recycled and beg for money on the streets. “I help a lot with my mom to find money to support the family. When there was a wedding in the village we would go and beg for the beer cans to sell them,” she said.

As they grew older, Ka’s older brothers got more formal jobs in manufacturing plants but as they formed their own families, their ability to financially support their parents and younger siblings diminished. As a result, Ka felt the need to also find a more formal job that would provide her with greater income. “I left home when I was 16 because of the poverty,” she said. “I left to the Thai border because one of my friends told me that if you go to work over there, you will earn a lot of money. So, I went.”

She started off working in a karaoke club, which are often used as fronts for brothels. Ka wasn’t completely sure what was happening behind the scenes. “I could see many things. It was very complicated,” she said. “I worked as the girl who sold the beer. Some men would touch my body, some men would kiss me,” she said, looking down.

The men who visited the club would often offer—even force—her to drink. After just two weeks she ended up unconscious in the hospital. She decided to leave that club and look for another job. She found one, at another club. “The owner was a man and he was a creepy guy. He wanted me to sleep with him, but I didn’t want to,” she said. “I remember one customer came in, he was Cambodian, and [the owner] asked me to go and sleep with him. When I went to sleep with the guy, I had the opportunity to escape.”

Alone and unemployed once again Ka was approached by a woman. “She asked me, ‘You want a job? You want to work?’ I said, ‘Yes, as long as it is a place with no alcohol and there’s no violence,’” Ka said. The woman took her to lunch and then told her to lie down and take a nap. “I asked her what my role would look like and she didn’t say anything,” Ka went on. “The woman just left me alone. I didn’t know at that time it was a brothel.”

It didn’t take her long, however, to find out. “At that time, I was very young and I didn’t really understand the process. The first day that I came, they bought me a lot of nice clothes,” she said. “It was quite late [when we got back] and there were some guys. They asked, ‘Are there any new girls?’”

The owner said yes and pointed to Ka. “The one in the black t-shirt, she’s a new girl,” the woman responded.

After two days, when Ka realized she was in a brothel, she got up the courage to try to leave, only to find out that according to her “employer” she owed them 25,000 Cambodian Reil, an amount that to her represented a lot of money. She owed about $6.

Ka worked in forced prostitution, serving between five and ten men per night, for more than two years to try to pay of her “debt” before the brothel was raided by the police and the girls were set free.

After two years of forced prostitution, Ka found herself unemployed, alone and on the street—again. “I didn’t have any chance. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have anywhere to go,” she explained. She was, again, convinced to work in another brothel. This time, however, it was worse.

“When I was in the second brothel, I could see the sunlight, but I could never see the sun,” she said. She and the other girls were never even allowed to leave the building. As if that was not enough, they beat the girls regularly. “I was afraid of my employer. I can remember one time when I was pregnant, the owner told me to do the abortion and I didn’t want to, so they said, ‘If you don’t want to do it, let me do it for you.’ It was very hurtful,” she said. Two weeks later, they beat her up again.

Ka’s hopes for her future were extinguished in that brothel, like a plant that never receives sunlight, she wilted on the inside. “I didn’t even think about future. All I could think about was that I would be dead someday because I wasn’t allowed to go out, I wasn’t allowed to see my family and I was always threatened,” she said.

No matter how hard Ka and the other girls “worked” they could never pay off their debts, especially as they were constantly forced to use drugs. “They gave me drugs because if I don’t take the drugs, I could not do it. I don’t have enough energy to work,” she explained.

REFLECTION:

Ka faced some horrible experiences that oppressed her ability to determine the course of her own life. Do you know what it is like to be speechless?

SUGGESTIONS FOR THIS WEEK’S EXPERIENCE:
• Give up your personal decisions / opinions for a week—choose a friend to make all those decisions for you.
• Give up electronics that are not critical for school or work—isolate yourself from all forms of communication and means of contacting the outside world.
• Do not speak about anything not critical to school or work. A variation of this can be to duct tape your mouth shut every day.

Feel free to modify these suggestions as you feel fit, and if none of these suggested experiences work for you, we encourage you to come up with your own creative way of experiencing the lack of control over your own life.