Half the sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide.
by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
INTRODUCTION.
The Girl EffectWhat would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.-MARK TWAIN.
Srey Rath is a self-confident Cambodian teenager whose black hair tumbles over a round, light brown face. She is in a crowded street market, standing beside a pushcart and telling her story calmly, with detachment. The only hint of anxiety or trauma is the way she often pushes her hair from in front of her black eyes, perhaps a nervous tic. Then she lowers her hand and her long fingers gesticulate and flutter in the air with incongruous grace as she recounts her odyssey.Rath is short and small-boned, pretty, vibrant, and bubbly, a wisp of a girl whose negligible stature contrasts with an outsized and outgoing personality. When the skies abruptly release a tropical rain shower that drenches us, she simply laughs and rushes us to cover under a tin roof, and then cheerfully continues her story as the rain drums overhead. But Rath"s attractiveness and winning personality are perilous bounties for a rural Cambodian girl, and her trusting nature and optimistic self-a.s.suredness compound the hazard.When Rath was fifteen, her family ran out of money, so she decided to go work as a dishwasher in Thailand for two months to help pay the bills. Her parents fretted about her safety, but they were rea.s.sured when Rath arranged to travel with four friends who had been promised jobs in the same Thai restaurant. The job agent took the girls deep into Thailand and then handed them to gangsters who took them to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. Rath was dazzled by her first glimpses of the city"s clean avenues and gleaming high-rises, including at the time the world"s tallest twin buildings; it seemed safe and welcoming. But then thugs sequestered Rath and two other girls inside a karaoke lounge that operated as a brothel. One gangster in his late thirties, a man known as "the boss," took charge of the girls and explained that he had paid money for them and that they would now be obliged to repay him. "You must find money to pay off the debt, and then I will send you back home," he said, repeatedly rea.s.suring them that if they cooperated they would eventually be released.Rath was shattered when what was happening dawned on her. The boss locked her up with a customer, who tried to force her to have s.e.x with him. She fought back, enraging the customer. "So the boss got angry and hit me in the face, first with one hand and then with the other," she remembers, telling her story with simple resignation. "The mark stayed on my face for two weeks." Then the boss and the other gangsters raped her and beat her with their fists."You have to serve the customers," the boss told her as he punched her. "If not, we will beat you to death. Do you want that?" Rath stopped protesting, but she sobbed and refused to cooperate actively. The boss forced her to take a pill; the gangsters called it "the happy drug" or "the shake drug." She doesn"t know exactly what it was, but it made her head shake and induced lethargy, happiness, and compliance for about an hour. When she wasn"t drugged, Rath was teary and insufficiently compliant-she was required to beam happily at all customers-so the boss said he would waste no more time on her: She would agree to do as he ordered or he would kill her. Rath then gave in. The girls were forced to work in the brothel seven days a week, fifteen hours a day. They were kept naked to make it more difficult for them to run away or to keep tips or other money, and they were forbidden to ask customers to use condoms. They were battered until they smiled constantly and simulated joy at the sight of customers, because men would not pay as much for s.e.x with girls with reddened eyes and haggard faces. The girls were never allowed out on the street or paid a penny for their work."They just gave us food to eat, but they didn"t give us much because the customers didn"t like fat girls," Rath says. The girls were bused, under guard, back and forth between the brothel and a tenth-floor apartment where a dozen of them were housed. The door of the apartment was locked from the outside. However, one night, some of the girls went out onto their balcony and pried loose a long, five-inch-wide board from a rack used for drying clothes. They balanced it precariously between their balcony and one on the next building, twelve feet away. The board wobbled badly, but Rath was desperate, so she sat astride the board and gradually inched across."There were four of us who did that," she says. "The others were too scared, because it was very rickety. I was scared, too, and I couldn"t look down, but I was even more scared to stay. We thought that even if we died, it would be better than staying behind. If we stayed, we would die as well."Once on the far balcony, the girls pounded on the window and woke the surprised tenant. They could hardly communicate with him because none of them spoke Malay, but the tenant let them into his apartment and then out its front door. The girls took the elevator down and wandered the silent streets until they found a police station and stepped inside. The police first tried to shoo them away, then arrested the girls for illegal immigration. Rath served a year in prison under Malaysia"s tough anti-immigrant laws, and then she was supposed to be repatriated. She thought a Malaysian policeman was escorting her home when he drove her to the Thai border-but then he sold her to a trafficker, who peddled her to a Thai brothel.Rath"s saga offers a glimpse of the brutality inflicted routinely on women and girls in much of the world, a malignancy that is slowly gaining recognition as one of the paramount human rights problems of this century.The issues involved, however, have barely registered on the global agenda. Indeed, when we began reporting about international affairs in the 1980s, we couldn"t have imagined writing this book. We a.s.sumed that the foreign policy issues that properly furrowed the brow were lofty and complex, like nuclear nonproliferation. It was difficult back then to envision the Council on Foreign Relations fretting about maternal mortality or female genital mutilation. Back then, the oppression of women was a fringe issue, the kind of worthy cause the Girl Scouts might raise money for. We preferred to probe the recondite "serious issues."So this book is the outgrowth of our own journey of awakening as we worked together as journalists for The New York Times The New York Times. The first milestone in that journey came in China. Sheryl is a Chinese-American who grew up in New York City, and Nicholas is an Oregonian who grew up on a sheep and cherry farm near Yamhill, Oregon. After we married, we moved to China, where seven months later we found ourselves standing on the edge of Tiananmen Square watching troops fire their automatic weapons at prodemocracy protesters. The ma.s.sacre claimed between four hundred and eight hundred lives and transfixed the world. It was the human rights story of the year, and it seemed just about the most shocking violation imaginable.Then, the following year, we came across an obscure but meticulous demographic study that outlined a human rights violation that had claimed tens of thousands more lives. This study found that thirty-nine thousand baby girls die annually in China because parents don"t give them the same medical care and attention that boys receive-and that is just in the first year of life. One Chinese family-planning official, Li Honggui, explained it this way: "If a boy gets sick, the parents may send him to the hospital at once. But if a girl gets sick, the parents may say to themselves, "Well, let"s see how she is tomorrow."" The result is that as many infant girls die unnecessarily every week every week in China as protesters died in the one incident at Tiananmen. Those Chinese girls never received a column inch of news coverage, and we began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed. in China as protesters died in the one incident at Tiananmen. Those Chinese girls never received a column inch of news coverage, and we began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed.A similar pattern emerged in other countries, particularly in South Asia and the Muslim world. In India, a "bride burning"-to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry-takes place approximately once every two hours, but these rarely const.i.tute news. In the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, Pakistan, five thousand women and girls have been doused in kerosene and set alight by family members or in-laws-or, perhaps worse, been seared with acid-for perceived disobedience just in the last nine years. Imagine the outcry if the Pakistani or Indian governments governments were burning women alive at those rates. Yet when the government is not directly involved, people shrug. were burning women alive at those rates. Yet when the government is not directly involved, people shrug.When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were routinely kidnapped and trafficked into brothels, we didn"t even consider it news. Partly that is because we journalists tend to be good at covering events that happen on a particular day, but we slip at covering events that happen every day-such as the quotidian cruelties inflicted on women and girls. We journalists weren"t the only ones who dropped the ball on this subject: Less than 1 percent of U.S. foreign aid is specifically targeted to women and girls.Amartya Sen, the ebullient n.o.bel Prize-winning economist, has developed a gauge of gender inequality that is a striking reminder of the stakes involved. "More than 100 million women are missing," Sen wrote in a cla.s.sic essay in 1990 in The New York Review of Books The New York Review of Books, spurring a new field of research. Sen noted that in normal circ.u.mstances women live longer than men, and so there are more females than males in much of the world. Even poor regions like most of Latin America and much of Africa have more females than males. Yet in places where girls have a deeply unequal status, they vanish vanish. China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population (and an even greater disproportion among newborns), India has 108, and Pakistan has 111. This has nothing to do with biology, and indeed the state of Kerala in the southwest of India, which has championed female education and equality, has the same excess of females that exists in the United States.[image]Naeema Azar, a real estate agent, was burned with acid in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, allegedly by her ex-husband. Since the acid blinded her, her twelve-year-old son, Ahmed Shah, guides her everywhere. (Nicholas D. Kristof) The implication of the s.e.x ratios, Professor Sen found, is that about 107 million females are missing from the globe today. Follow-up studies have calculated the number slightly differently, deriving alternative figures for "missing women" of between 60 million and 101 million. Every year, at least another 2 million girls worldwide disappear because of gender discrimination.In the wealthy countries of the West, discrimination is usually a matter of unequal pay or underfunded sports teams or unwanted touching from a boss. In contrast, in much of the world discrimination is lethal. In India, for example, mothers are less likely to take their daughters to be vaccinated than their sons-that alone accounts for one fifth of India"s missing females-while studies have found that, on average, girls are brought to the hospital only when they are sicker than boys taken to the hospital. All told, girls in India from one to five years of age are 50 percent more likely to die than boys the same age. The best estimate is that a little Indian girl dies from discrimination every four minutes.[image]Ummi Ababiya, a thirteen-year-old Ethiopian girl, in an emergency feeding station in southern Ethiopia. Her mother, Zahra, right, said that all the males in the family were well-nourished. Of the dozens of children in the feeding center, almost all were girls, reflecting the way parents typically give priority to boys when food is scarce. Such discrimination kills up to 2 million girls each year worldwide. (Nicholas D. Kristof) A big, bearded Afghan named Sedanshah once told us that his wife and son were sick. He wanted both to survive, he said, but his priorities were clear: A son is an indispensable treasure, while a wife is replaceable. He had purchased medication for the boy alone. "She"s always sick," he gruffly said of his wife, "so it"s not worth buying medicine for her."Modernization and technology can aggravate the discrimination. Since the 1990s, the spread of ultrasound machines has allowed pregnant women to find out the s.e.x of their fetuses-and then get abortions if they are female. In Fujian Province, China, a peasant raved to us about ultrasound: "We don"t have to have daughters anymore!"To prevent s.e.x-selective abortion, China and India now bar doctors and ultrasound technicians from telling a pregnant woman the s.e.x of her fetus. Yet that is a flawed solution. Research shows that when parents are banned from selectively aborting female fetuses, more of their daughters die as infants. Mothers do not deliberately dispatch infant girls they are obligated to give birth to, but they are lackadaisical in caring for them. A development economist at Brown University, Nancy Qian, quantified the wrenching trade-off: On average, the deaths of fifteen infant girls can be avoided by allowing one hundred female fetuses to be selectively aborted.The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine "gendercide" in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality in the developing world.The owners of the Thai brothel to which Rath was sold did not beat her and did not constantly guard her. So two months later, she was able to escape and make her way back to Cambodia.Upon her return, Rath met a social worker who put her in touch with an aid group that helps girls who have been trafficked start new lives. The group, American a.s.sistance for Cambodia, used $400 in donated funds to buy a small cart and a starter selection of goods so that Rath could become a street peddler. She found a good spot in the open area between the Thai and Cambodian customs offices in the border town of Poipet. Travelers crossing between Thailand and Cambodia walk along this strip, the size of a football field, and it is lined with peddlers selling drinks, snacks, and souvenirs.Rath outfitted her cart with shirts and hats, costume jewelry, notebooks, pens, and small toys. Now her good looks and outgoing personality began to work in her favor, turning her into an effective saleswoman. She saved and invested in new merchandise, her business thrived, and she was able to support her parents and two younger sisters. She married and had a son, and she began saving for his education.In 2008, Rath turned her cart into a stall, and then also acquired the stall next door. She also started a "public phone" business by charging people to use her cell phone. So if you ever cross from Thailand into Cambodia at Poipet, look for a shop on your left, halfway down the strip, where a teenage girl will call out to you, smile, and try to sell you a souvenir cap. She"ll laugh and claim she"s giving you a special price, and she"s so bubbly and appealing that she"ll probably make the sale.[image]Srey Rath and her son in front of her shop in Cambodia (Nicholas D. Kristof) Rath"s eventual triumph is a reminder that if girls get a chance, in the form of an education or a microloan, they can be more than baubles or slaves; many of them can run businesses. Talk to Rath today-after you"ve purchased that cap-and you find that she exudes confidence as she earns a solid income that will provide a better future for her sisters and for her young son. Many of the stories in this book are wrenching, but keep in mind this central truth: Women aren"t the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity Women aren"t the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.That was a lesson we absorbed in Sheryl"s ancestral village, at the end of a dirt road amid the rice paddies of southern China. For many years we have regularly trod the mud paths of the Taishan region to Shunshui, the hamlet in which Sheryl"s paternal grandfather grew up. China traditionally has been one of the more repressive and smothering places for girls, and we could see hints of this in Sheryl"s own family history. Indeed, on our first visit, we accidentally uncovered a family secret: a long-lost stepgrandmother. Sheryl"s grandfather had traveled to America with his first wife, but she had given birth only to daughters. So Sheryl"s grandfather gave up on her and returned her to Shunshui, where he married a younger woman as a second wife and took her to America. This was Sheryl"s grandmother, who duly gave birth to a son-Sheryl"s dad. The previous wife and daughters were then wiped out of the family memory.Something bothered us each time we explored Shunshui and the surrounding villages: Where were the young women? Young men were toiling industriously in the paddies or fanning themselves indolently in the shade, but young women and girls were scarce. We finally discovered them when we stepped into the factories that were then spreading throughout Guangdong Province, the epicenter of China"s economic eruption. These factories produced the shoes, toys, and shirts that filled America"s shopping malls, generating economic growth rates almost unprecedented in the history of the world-and creating the most effective antipoverty program ever recorded. The factories turned out to be cacophonous hives of distaff bees. Eighty percent of the employees on the a.s.sembly lines in coastal China are female, and the proportion across the manufacturing belt of East Asia is at least 70 percent. The economic explosion in Asia was, in large part, an outgrowth of the economic empowerment of women. "They have smaller fingers, so they"re better at st.i.tching," the manager of a purse factory explained to us. "They"re obedient and work harder than men," said the head of a toy factory. "And we can pay them less."Women are indeed a linchpin of the region"s development strategy. Economists who scrutinized East Asia"s success noted a common pattern. These countries took young women who previously had contributed negligibly to gross national product (GNP) and injected them into the formal economy, hugely increasing the labor force. The basic formula was to ease repression, educate girls as well as boys, give the girls the freedom to move to the cities and take factory jobs, and then benefit from a demographic dividend as they delayed marriage and reduced childbearing. The women meanwhile financed the education of younger relatives, and saved enough of their pay to boost national savings rates. This pattern has been called "the girl effect." In a nod to the female chromosomes, it could also be called "the double X solution."Evidence has mounted that helping women can be a successful poverty-fighting strategy anywhere in the world, not just in the booming economies of East Asia. The Self Employed Women"s a.s.sociation was founded in India in 1972 and ever since has supported the poorest women in starting businesses-raising living standards in ways that have dazzled scholars and foundations. In Bangladesh, Muhammad Yunus developed microfinance at the Grameen Bank and targeted women borrowers-eventually winning a n.o.bel Peace Prize for the economic and social impact of his work. Another Bangladeshi group, BRAC, the largest antipoverty organization in the world, worked with the poorest women to save lives and raise incomes-and Grameen and BRAC made the aid world increasingly see women not just as potential beneficiaries of their work, but as agents of it.In the early 1990s, the United Nations and the World Bank began to appreciate the potential resource that women and girls represent. "Investment in girls" education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world," Lawrence Summers wrote when he was chief economist of the World Bank. "The question is not whether countries can afford this investment, but whether countries can afford not to educate more girls." In 2001 the World Bank produced an influential study, Engendering Development Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice Engendering Development Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice, arguing that promoting gender equality is crucial to combat global poverty. UNICEF issued a major report arguing that gender equality yields a "double dividend" by elevating not only women but also their children and communities. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) summed up the mounting research this way: "Women"s empowerment helps raise economic productivity and reduce infant mortality. It contributes to improved health and nutrition. It increases the chances of education for the next generation."More and more, the most influential scholars of development and public health-including Sen and Summers, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, and Dr. Paul Farmer-are calling for much greater attention to women in development. Private aid groups and foundations have shifted gears as well. "Women are the key to ending hunger in Africa," declared the Hunger Project. French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, who founded Doctors Without Borders, bluntly declared of development: "Progress is achieved through women." The Center for Global Development issued a major report explaining "why and how to put girls at the center of development." CARE is taking women and girls as the centerpiece of its antipoverty efforts. The Nike Foundation and the NoVo Foundation are both focusing on building opportunities for girls in the developing world. "Gender inequality hurts economic growth," Goldman Sachs concluded in a 2008 research report that emphasized how much developing countries could improve their economic performance by educating girls. Partly as a result of that research, Goldman Sachs committed $100 million to a "10,000 Women" campaign meant to give that many women a business education.Concerns about terrorism after the 9/11 attacks triggered interest in these issues in an unlikely const.i.tuency: the military and counterterrorism agencies. Some security experts noted that the countries that nurture terrorists are disproportionally those where women are marginalized. The reason there are so many Muslim terrorists, they argued, has little to do with the Koran but a great deal to do with the lack of robust female partic.i.p.ation in the economy and society of many Islamic countries. As the Pentagon gained a deeper understanding of counterterrorism, and as it found that dropping bombs often didn"t do much to help, it became increasingly interested in gra.s.sroots projects such as girls" education. Empowering girls, some in the military argued, would disempower terrorists. When the Joint Chiefs of Staff hold discussions of girls" education in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as they did in 2008, you know that gender is a serious topic that fits squarely on the international affairs agenda. That"s evident also in the Council on Foreign Relations. The wood-paneled halls that have been used for discussions of MIRV warheads and NATO policy are now employed as well to host well-attended sessions on maternal mortality.We will try to lay out an agenda for the world"s women focusing on three particular abuses: s.e.x trafficking and forced prost.i.tution; gender-based violence, including honor killings and ma.s.s rape; and maternal mortality, which still needlessly claims one woman a minute. We will lay out solutions such as girls" education and microfinance, which are working right now.It"s true that there are many injustices in the world, many worthy causes competing for attention and support, and we all have divided allegiances. We focus on this topic because, to us, this kind of oppression feels transcendent-and so does the opportunity. We have seen that outsiders can truly make a significant difference.Consider Rath once more. We had been so shaken by her story that we wanted to locate that brothel in Malaysia, interview its owners, and try to free the girls still imprisoned there. Unfortunately, we couldn"t determine the brothel"s name or address. (Rath didn"t know English or even the Roman alphabet, so she hadn"t been able to read signs when she was there.) When we asked her if she would be willing to return to Kuala Lumpur and help us find the brothel, she turned ashen. "I don"t know," she said. "I don"t want to face that again." She wavered, talked it over with her family, and ultimately agreed to go back in the hope of rescuing her girlfriends.Rath voyaged back to Kuala Lumpur with the protection of an interpreter and a local ant.i.trafficking activist. Nonetheless, she trembled in the red-light districts upon seeing the cheerful neon signs that she a.s.sociated with so much pain. But since her escape, Malaysia had been embarra.s.sed by public criticism about trafficking, so the police had cracked down on the worst brothels that imprisoned girls against their will. One of those was Rath"s. A modest amount of international scolding had led a government to take action, resulting in an observable improvement in the lives of girls at the bottom of the power pyramid. The outcome underscores that this is a hopeful cause, not a bleak one.Honor killings, s.e.xual slavery, and genital cutting may seem to Western readers to be tragic but inevitable in a world far, far away. In much the same way, slavery was once widely viewed by many decent Europeans and Americans as a regrettable but ineluctable feature of human life. It was just one more horror that had existed for thousands of years. But then in the 1780s a few indignant Britons, led by William Wilberforce, decided that slavery was so offensive that they had to abolish it. And they did. Today we see the seed of something similar: a global movement to emanc.i.p.ate women and girls.So let us be clear about this up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emanc.i.p.ate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women"s power as economic catalysts. That is the process under way-not a drama of victimization but of empowerment, the kind that transforms bubbly teenage girls from brothel slaves into successful businesswomen.This is a story of transformation. It is change that is already taking place, and change that can accelerate if you"ll just open your heart and join in.
CHAPTER ONE.
Emanc.i.p.ating Twenty-First-Century SlavesWomen might just have something to contribute to civilization other than their v.a.g.i.n.as.-CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY, Florence of Arabia Florence of Arabia The red-light district in the town of Forbesgunge does not actually have any red lights. Indeed, there is no electricity. The brothels are simply mud-walled family compounds along a dirt path, with thatch-roof shacks set aside for customers. Children play and scurry along the dirt paths, and a one-room shop on the corner sells cooking oil, rice, and bits of candy. Here, in the impoverished northern Indian state of Bihar, near the Nepalese border, there"s not much else available commercially-except s.e.x.As Meena Hasina walks down the path, the children pause and stare at her. The adults stop as well, some glowering, and the tension rises. Meena is a lovely, dark-skinned Indian woman in her thirties with warm, crinkly eyes and a stud in her left nostril. She wears a sari and ties her black hair back, and she seems utterly relaxed as she strolls among people who despise her.Meena is an Indian Muslim who for years was prost.i.tuted in a brothel run by the Nutt, a low-caste tribe that controls the local s.e.x trade. The Nutt have traditionally engaged in prost.i.tution and petty crime, and theirs is the world of intergenerational prost.i.tution, in which mothers sell s.e.x and raise their daughters to do the same.Meena strolls through the brothels to a larger hut that functions as a part-time school, sits down, and makes herself comfortable. Behind her, the villagers gradually resume their activities."I was eight or nine years old when I was kidnapped and trafficked," Meena begins. She is from a poor family on the Nepal border and was sold to a Nutt clan, then taken to a rural house where the brothel owner kept prep.u.b.escent girls until they were mature enough to attract customers. When she was twelve-she remembers that it was five months before her first period-she was taken to the brothel.[image]Meena Hasina with her son, Vivek, in Bihar, India (Nicholas D. Kristof) "They brought in the first client, and they"d taken lots of money from him," Meena recounted, speaking clinically and without emotion. The induction was similar to that endured by Rath in Malaysia, for s.e.x trafficking operates on the same business model worldwide, and the same methods are used to break girls everywhere. "I started fighting and crying out, so that he couldn"t succeed," Meena said. "I resisted so much that they had to return the money to him. And they beat me mercilessly, with a belt, with sticks, with iron rods. The beating was tremendous." She shook her head to clear the memory. "But even then I resisted. They showed me swords and said they would kill me if I didn"t agree. Four or five times, they brought customers in, and I still resisted, and they kept beating me. Finally they drugged me: They gave me wine in my drink and got me completely drunk." Then one of the brothel owners raped her. She awoke, hungover and hurting, and realized what had happened. "Now I am wasted," she thought, and so she gave in and stopped fighting customers.In Meena"s brothel, the tyrant was the family matriarch, Ainul Bibi. Sometimes Ainul would beat the girls herself, and sometimes she would delegate the task to her daughter-in-law or to her sons, who were brutal in inflicting punishment."I wasn"t even allowed to cry," Meena remembers. "If even one tear fell, they would beat me. I used to think that it was better to die than to live like this. Once I jumped from the balcony, but nothing happened. I didn"t even break a leg."[image]Gangsters in Bihar, India, tried to force this man to sell his daughter into prost.i.tution. When he refused and the girl hid, they destroyed his home. The aid organization Apne Aap Women Worldwide is helping the family (Nicholas D. Kristof)Meena and the other girls were never allowed out of the brothel and were never paid. They typically had ten or more customers a day, seven days a week. If a girl fell asleep or complained about a stomachache, the issue was resolved with a beating. And when a girl showed any hint of resistance, all the girls would be summoned to watch as the recalcitrant one was tied up and savagely beaten. "They turned the stereo up loud to cover the screams," Meena said dryly.India almost certainly has more modern slaves, in conditions like these, than any other country. There are 2 to 3 million prost.i.tutes in India, and although many of them now sell s.e.x to some degree willingly, and are paid, a significant share of them entered the s.e.x industry unwillingly. One 2008 study of Indian brothels found that of Indian and Nepali prost.i.tutes who started as teenagers, about half said they had been coerced into the brothels; women who began working in their twenties were more likely to have made the choice themselves, often to feed their children. Those who start out enslaved often accept their fate eventually and sell s.e.x willingly, because they know nothing else and are too stigmatized to hold other jobs.China has more prost.i.tutes than India-some estimates are as high as 10 million or more-but fewer of them are forced into brothels against their will. Indeed, China has few brothels as such. Many of the prost.i.tutes are freelancers working as ding-dong xiaojie ding-dong xiaojie (so called because they ring hotel rooms looking for business), and even those working in ma.s.sage parlors and saunas are typically there on commission and can leave if they want to. (so called because they ring hotel rooms looking for business), and even those working in ma.s.sage parlors and saunas are typically there on commission and can leave if they want to.Paradoxically, it is the countries with the most straitlaced and s.e.xually conservative societies, such as India, Pakistan, and Iran, that have disproportionately large numbers of forced prost.i.tutes. Since young men in those societies rarely sleep with their girlfriends, it has become acceptable for them to relieve their s.e.xual frustrations with prost.i.tutes.The implicit social contract is that upper-cla.s.s girls will keep their virtue, while young men will find satisfaction in the brothels. And the brothels will be staffed with slave girls trafficked from Nepal or Bangladesh or poor Indian villages. As long as the girls are uneducated, low-caste peasants like Meena, society will look the other way-just as many antebellum Americans turned away from the horrors of slavery because the people being lashed looked different from them.In Meena"s brothel, no one used condoms. Meena is healthy for now, but she has never had an AIDS test. (While HIV prevalence is low in India, prost.i.tutes are at particular risk because of their large number of customers.) Because Meena didn"t use condoms, she became pregnant, and this filled her with despair."I used to think that I never wanted to be a mother, because my life had been wasted, and I didn"t want to waste another life," Meena said. But Ainul"s brothel, like many in India, welcomed the pregnancy as a chance to breed a new generation of victims. Girls are raised to be prost.i.tutes, and boys become servants to do the laundry and cooking.In the brothel, without medical help, Meena gave birth to a baby girl, whom she named Naina. But soon afterward, Ainul took the baby away from Meena, partly to stop her from breast-feeding-customers dislike prost.i.tutes who are lactating-and partly to keep the baby as a hostage to ensure that Meena would not try to flee."We will not let Naina stay with you," Ainul told her. "You are a prost.i.tute, and you have no honor. So you might run away." Later a son, Vivek, followed, and the owners also took him away. So both of Meena"s children were raised by others in the brothel, mostly in sections of the compound where she was not allowed to go."They held my children captive, so they thought I would never try to escape," she said. To some degree, the strategy worked. Meena once helped thirteen of the girls escape, but didn"t flee herself because she couldn"t bear to leave her children. The penalty for staying behind was a brutal beating for complicity in the escape.Ainul had herself been a prost.i.tute when she was young, so she was unsympathetic to the younger girls. "If my own daughters can be prost.i.tuted, then you can be, too," Ainul would tell the girls. And it was true that she had prost.i.tuted her own two daughters. ("They had to be beaten up to agree to it," Meena explained. "No one wants to go into this.")Meena estimates that in the dozen years she was in the brothel, she was beaten on average five days a week. Most girls were quickly broken and cowed, but Meena never quite gave in. Her distinguishing characteristic is obstinacy. She can be dogged and mulish, and that is one reason the villagers find her so unpleasant. She breaches the pattern of femininity in rural India by talking back-and fighting back.The police seemed unlikely saviors to girls in the brothels because police officers regularly visited the brothels and were serviced free. But Meena was so desperate that she once slipped out and went to the police station to demand help."I was forced into prost.i.tution by a brothel in town," Meena told the astonished desk officer at the police station. "The pimps beat me up, and they"re holding my children hostage." Other policemen came out to see this unusual sight, and they mocked her and told her to go back."You have great audacity to come here!" one policeman scolded her. In the end, the police sent her back after extracting a promise from the brothel not to beat her. The brothel owners did not immediately punish her. But a friendly neighbor warned Meena that the brothel owners had decided to murder her. That doesn"t happen often in red-light districts, any more than farmers kill producing a.s.sets such as good milk cows, but from time to time a prost.i.tute becomes so nettlesome that the owners kill her as a warning to the other girls.Fearing for her life, Meena abandoned her children and fled the brothel. She traveled several hours by train to Forbesgunge. Someone there told one of Ainul"s sons, Manooj, of her whereabouts, and he soon arrived to beat up Meena. Manooj didn"t want her causing trouble in his brothel again, so he told her she could live on her own in Forbesgunge and prost.i.tute herself, but she would have to give him money. Not knowing how she could survive otherwise, Meena agreed.Whenever Manooj returned to Forbesgunge to collect money, he was dissatisfied with the amount Meena gave him and beat her. Once Manooj threw Meena to the ground and was beating her furiously with a belt when a respectable local man intervened."You"re already pimping her, you"re already taking her lifeblood," remonstrated her savior, a pharmacist named Kuduz. "Why beat her to death as well?"It wasn"t the same as leaping on Manooj to pull him off her, but for a woman like Meena, who was scorned by society, it was startling to have anyone speak up for her. Manooj backed off, and Kuduz helped her up. Meena and Kuduz lived near each other in Forbesgunge, and the incident created a bond between them. Soon Kuduz and Meena were chatting regularly, and then he offered to marry her. Thrilled, she accepted.Manooj was furious when he heard about the marriage, and he offered Kuduz 100,000 rupees ($2,500) to give Meena up-a sum that perhaps reflected his concern that she might use her new respectability as a married woman to cause trouble for the brothel. Kuduz wasn"t interested in a deal."Even if you offer me two hundred fifty thousand rupees, I will not give her up," Kuduz said. "Love has no price."After they were married, Meena bore two daughters with Kuduz, and she went back to her native village to look for her parents. Her mother had died-neighbors said she had cried constantly after Meena disappeared, then had gone mad-but her father was stunned and thrilled to see his daughter resurrected.Life was clearly better, but Meena couldn"t forget her first two children left behind in the brothel. So she began making journeys back-five hours by bus-to Ainul Bibi"s brothel. There she would stand outside and plead for Naina and Vivek."As many times as I could, I would go back to fight for my children," she remembered. "I knew they would not let me take my children. I knew they would beat me up. But I thought I had to keep trying."It didn"t work. Ainul and Manooj didn"t let Meena in the brothel; they whipped her and drove her away. The police wouldn"t listen to her. The brothel owners not only threatened to kill her, they also threatened to kidnap her two young daughters with Kuduz and sell them to a brothel. Once a couple of gangsters showed up at Meena"s house in Forbesgunge to steal the two little girls, but Kuduz grabbed a knife and warned: "If you even try to steal them, I"ll cut you into pieces."Meena was terrified for her two younger girls, but she couldn"t forget Naina. She knew that Naina was approaching p.u.b.erty and would soon be put on the market. But what could she do?Interviewing women like Meena over the years has led us to change our own views on s.e.x trafficking. Growing up in the United States and then living in China and j.a.pan, we thought of prost.i.tution as something that women may turn to opportunistically or out of economic desperation. In Hong Kong, we knew an Australian prost.i.tute who slipped Sheryl into the locker room of her "men"s club" to meet the local girls, who were there because they saw a chance to enrich themselves. We certainly didn"t think of prost.i.tutes as slaves, forced to do what they do, for most prost.i.tutes in America, China, and j.a.pan aren"t truly enslaved.Yet it"s not hyperbole to say that millions of women and girls are are actually enslaved today. (The biggest difference from nineteenth-century slavery is that many die of AIDS by their late twenties.) The term that is usually used for this phenomenon, "s.e.x trafficking," is a misnomer. The problem isn"t s.e.x, nor is it prost.i.tution as such. In many countries-China, Brazil, and most of sub-Saharan Africa-prost.i.tution is widespread but mostly voluntary (in the sense that it is driven by economic pressure rather than physical compulsion). In those places, brothels do not lock up women, and many women work on their own without pimps or brothels. Nor is the problem exactly "trafficking," since forced prost.i.tution doesn"t always depend on a girl"s being transported over a great distance by a middleman. The horror of s.e.x trafficking can more properly be labeled slavery. actually enslaved today. (The biggest difference from nineteenth-century slavery is that many die of AIDS by their late twenties.) The term that is usually used for this phenomenon, "s.e.x trafficking," is a misnomer. The problem isn"t s.e.x, nor is it prost.i.tution as such. In many countries-China, Brazil, and most of sub-Saharan Africa-prost.i.tution is widespread but mostly voluntary (in the sense that it is driven by economic pressure rather than physical compulsion). In those places, brothels do not lock up women, and many women work on their own without pimps or brothels. Nor is the problem exactly "trafficking," since forced prost.i.tution doesn"t always depend on a girl"s being transported over a great distance by a middleman. The horror of s.e.x trafficking can more properly be labeled slavery.The total number of modern slaves is difficult to estimate. The International Labour Organization, a UN agency, estimates that at any one time there are 12.3 million people engaged in forced labor of all kinds, not just s.e.xual servitude. A UN report estimated that 1 million children in Asia alone are held in conditions indistinguishable from slavery. And The Lancet The Lancet, a prominent medical journal in Britain, calculated that "1 million children are forced into prost.i.tution every year and the total number of prost.i.tuted children could be as high as 10 million."Ant.i.trafficking campaigners tend to use higher numbers, such as 27 million modern slaves. That figure originated in research by Kevin Bales, who runs a fine organization called Free the Slaves. Numbers are difficult to calculate in part because s.e.x workers can"t be divided neatly into categories of those working voluntarily and those working involuntarily. Some commentators look at prost.i.tutes and see only s.e.x slaves; others see only entrepreneurs. But in reality there are some in each category and many other women who inhabit a gray zone between freedom and slavery.An essential part of the brothel business model is to break the spirit of girls, through humiliation, rape, threats, and violence. We met a fifteen-year-old Thai girl whose initiation consisted of being forced to eat dog droppings so as to shatter her self-esteem. Once a girl is broken and terrified, all hope of escape squeezed out of her, force may no longer be necessary to control her. She may smile and laugh at pa.s.sersby, and try to grab them and tug them into the brothel. Many a foreigner would a.s.sume that she is there voluntarily. But in that situation, complying with the will of the brothel owner does not signify consent.Our own estimate is that there are 3 million women and girls (and a very small number of boys) worldwide who can be fairly termed enslaved in the s.e.x trade. That is a conservative estimate that does not include many others who are manipulated and intimidated into prost.i.tution. Nor does it include millions more who are under eighteen and cannot meaningfully consent to work in brothels. We are talking about 3 million people who in effect are the property of another person and in many cases could be killed by their owner with impunity.Technically, trafficking is often defined as taking someone (by force or deception) across an international border. The U.S. State Department has estimated that between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year, 80 percent of them women and girls, mostly for s.e.xual exploitation. Since Meena didn"t cross a border, she wasn"t trafficked in the traditional sense. That"s also true of most people who are enslaved in brothels. As the U.S. State Department notes, its estimate doesn"t include "millions of victims around the world who are trafficked within their own national borders."In contrast, in the peak decade of the transatlantic slave trade, the 1780s, an average of just under eighty thousand slaves were shipped annually across the Atlantic from Africa to the New World. The average then dropped to a bit more than fifty thousand between 1811 and 1850. In other words, far more women and girls are shipped into brothels each year in the early twenty-first century than African slaves were shipped into slave plantations each year in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries-although the overall population was of course far smaller then. As the journal Foreign Affairs Foreign Affairs observed: "Whatever the exact number is, it seems almost certain that the modern global slave trade is larger in absolute terms than the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was." observed: "Whatever the exact number is, it seems almost certain that the modern global slave trade is larger in absolute terms than the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was."[image]Long Pross was thirteen when she was kidnapped and sold to a brothel in Cambodia. When she rebelled, the female brothel owner punished her by gouging out her eye with a metal rod. (Nicholas D. Kristof) As on slave plantations two centuries ago, there are few practical restraints on slave owners. In 1791, North Carolina decreed that killing a slave amounted to "murder," and Georgia later established that killing or maiming a slave was legally the same as killing or maiming a white person. But these doctrines existed more on paper than on plantations, just as Pakistani laws exist in the statute books but don"t impede brothel owners who choose to eliminate troublesome girls.While there has been progress in addressing many humanitarian issues in the last few decades, s.e.x slavery has actually worsened. One reason for that is the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and Indochina. In Romania and other countries, the immediate result was economic distress, and everywhere criminal gangs arose and filled the power vacuum. Capitalism created new markets for rice and potatoes, but also for female flesh.A second reason for the growth of trafficking is globalization. A generation ago, people stayed at home; now it is easier and cheaper to set out for the city or a distant country. A Nigerian girl whose mother never left her tribal area may now find herself in a brothel in Italy. In rural Moldova, it is possible to drive from village to village and not find a female between the ages of sixteen and thirty.A third reason for the worsening situation is AIDS. Being sold to a brothel was always a hideous fate, but not usually a death sentence. Now it often is. And because of the fear of AIDS, customers prefer younger girls whom they believe are less likely to be infected. In both Asia and Africa, there is also a legend that AIDS can be cured by s.e.x with a virgin, and that has nurtured demand for young girls kidnapped from their villages.These factors explain our emphasis on s.e.x slaves as opposed to other kinds of forced labor. Anybody who has spent time in Indian brothels and also, say, at Indian brick kilns knows that it is better to be enslaved working a kiln. Kiln workers most likely live together with their families, and their work does not expose them to the risk of AIDS, so there"s always hope of escape down the road.Inside the brothel, Naina and Vivek were beaten, starved, and abused. They were also confused about their parentage. Naina grew up calling Ainul Grandma, and Ainul"s son Vinod, Father. Naina sometimes was told that Vinod"s wife, Pinky, was her mother; at other times she was told her mother had died and that Pinky was her stepmother. But when Naina asked to go to school, Vinod refused and described the relationship in blunter terms."You must obey me," he told Naina, "because I am your owner."The neighbors tried to advise the children. "People used to say that they could not be my real parents, because they tortured me so much," Naina recalled. Occasionally, the children heard or even saw Meena coming to the door and calling out to them. Once Meena saw Naina and told her, "I am your mother.""No," Naina replied. "Pinky is my mother."Vivek remembers Meena"s visits as well. "I used to see her being beaten up and driven away," he says. "They told me that my mother was dead, but the neighbors told me that she was my mother after all, and I saw her coming back to try to fight for me."Naina and Vivek never went to a day of school, never saw a doctor, and were rarely allowed out. They were a.s.signed ch.o.r.es such as sweeping floors and washing clothes, and they had only rags to wear-and no shoes, for that might encourage them to run away. Then, when Naina was twelve, she was paraded before an older man in a way that left her feeling uncomfortable. "When I asked "Mother" about the man," Naina recalled, "she beat me up and sent me to bed without dinner."A couple of days later, "Mother" told Naina to bathe and took her to the market, where she bought her nice clothes and a nose ring. "When I asked her why she was buying me all these things, she started scolding me. She told me that I had to listen to everything the man says. She also told me, "Your father has taken money from the man for you." I started crying out loudly."Pinky told Naina to wear the clothes, but the girl threw them away, crying inconsolably. Vivek was only eleven, a short boy with a meek manner. But he had inherited his mother"s incomprehension of surrender. So he pleaded with his "parents" and his "grandma" to let his sister go, or to find a husband for her. Each appeal brought him only another beating-administered with scorn. "You don"t earn any income," "Father" told him mockingly, "so how do you think you can look after your sister?"Yet Vivek found the courage to confront his tormentors again and again, begging for his sister"s freedom. In a town where police officers, government officials, Hindu priests, and respectable middle-cla.s.s citizens all averted their eyes from forced prost.i.tution, the only audible voice of conscience belonged to an eleven-year-old boy who was battered each time he spoke up. His outspokenness gained him nothing, though. Vinod and Pinky locked him up, forced Naina into the new clothes, and the girl"s career as a prost.i.tute began."My "mother" was telling me not to get scared, as he is a nice man," Naina remembered. "Then they locked me inside the room with the man. The man told me to lock the room from the inside. I slapped him.... Then that man forced me. He raped me."Once a customer gave Naina a tip, and she secretly pa.s.sed on the money to Vivek. They thought that perhaps Vivek could use a phone, a technology that they had no experience with, to track down the mysterious woman who claimed to be their real mother and seek help from her. But when Vivek tried to use the telephone, the brothel owners found out and both children were flogged.Ainul thought that Vivek could be distracted with girls, and so he was told to try to have s.e.x with the prost.i.tutes. He was overwhelmed and intimidated at the thought, and when he balked, Pinky beat him up. Seething and fearful of what would become of his sister, Vivek decided that their only hope would be for him to run away and try to find the person who claimed to be their mother. Somewhere Vivek had heard that the woman"s name was Meena and that she lived in Forbesgunge, so he fled to the train station one morning and used Naina"s tip to buy a ticket."I was trembling because I thought that they would come after me and cut me into pieces," he recalled. After arriving in Forbesgunge, he asked directions to the brothel district. He trudged down the road to the red-light area and then asked one pa.s.serby after another: Where is Meena? Where does she live? Where is Meena? Where does she live?Finally, after a long walk and many missed turns, he knew he was close to her home, and he called out: Meena! Meena! Meena! Meena! A woman came out of one little home-Vivek"s lip quivered as he recounted this part of the story-and looked him over wonderingly. The boy and the woman gazed at each other for a long moment, and then the woman finally said in astonishment: "Are you Vivek?" A woman came out of one little home-Vivek"s lip quivered as he recounted this part of the story-and looked him over wonderingly. The boy and the woman gazed at each other for a long moment, and then the woman finally said in astonishment: "Are you Vivek?"The reunion was sublime. It was a blessed few weeks of giddy, unadulterated joy, the first happiness that Vivek had known in his life. Meena is a warm and emotional woman, and Vivek was thrilled to feel a mother"s love for the first time. Yet now that Meena had news about Naina, her doggedness came to the surface again: She was determined to recover her daughter."I gave birth to her, and so I can never forget her," Meena said. "I must fight for her as long as I breathe. Every day without Naina feels like a year."Meena had noticed that Apne Aap Women Worldwide, an organization that fights s.e.x slavery in India, had opened an office in Forbesgunge. Apne Aap is based in Kolkata, the city formerly known as Calcutta, but its founder-a determined former journalist named Ruchira Gupta-grew up partly in Forbesgunge. Other aid groups are reluctant to work in rural Bihar because of the widespread criminality, but Ruchira knew the area and thought it was worth the risk to open a branch office. One of the first people to drop in was Meena. "Please, please," Meena begged Ruchira, "help me get my daughter back!"There had never been a police raid on a brothel in Bihar State, as far as anyone knew, but Ruchira decided that this could be the first. While Ainul Bibi"s brothel had warm ties with the local police, Ruchira had strong connections with national police officials. And Ruchira can be every bit as intimidating as any brothel owner.[image]Naina shortly after her rescue from the brothel (Sraboni Sircar) So Apne Aap harangued the local police into raiding the brothel to rescue Naina. The police burst in, found Naina, and took her to the police station. But the girl had been so drugged and broken that at the station she looked at Meena and declared numbly: "I"m not your daughter." Meena was shattered.Naina explained later that she had felt alone and terrified, partly because Ainul Bibi had told her that Vivek had died. But after an hour in the police station, Naina began to realize that maybe she could escape the brothel, and she finally whispered: "Yes, you"re my mother."Apne Aap whisked Naina off to a hospital in Kolkata, where she was treated for severe injuries and a morphine addiction. The brothel had drugged Naina constantly to render her compliant, and the morphine withdrawal was brutal to watch.In Forbesgunge, life became more difficult and dangerous for Meena and her family. Some of the brothel owners there are related to Ainul and Manooj, and they were furious at Meena. Even those in the Nutt community who didn"t like prost.i.tution disapproved of the police raid, and so the townspeople shunned Apne Aap"s school and shelter. Meena and her children were stigmatized, and a young man working with Apne Aap was stabbed. Threats were made against Meena"s two daughters with Kuduz. Yet Meena was serene as she walked about the streets. She laughed at the idea that she should feel cowed."They think that good is bad," she scoffed, speaking of the local villagers. "They may not speak to me, but I know what is right and I will stick to it. I will never accept prost.i.tution of myself or my children as long as I breathe." Meena is working as a community organizer in Forbesgunge, trying to discourage parents from prost.i.tuting their daughters and urging them to educate their sons and daughters alike. Over time the resentment against her has diminished a bit, but she is still seen as pushy and unfeminine.Apne Aap later started a boarding school in Bihar, partly with donations from American supporters, and Meena"s children were placed there. The school has a guard and is a much safer place for them. Naina now studies at the boarding school and hopes to become a teacher, and in particular to help disadvantaged children.One afternoon, Meena was singing to her two young daughters, teaching them a song:India will not be free, Until its women are free.
What about the girls in this country?
If girls are insulted and abused and enslaved in this country, Put your hand on your heart and ask, Is this country truly independent?Fighting Slavery from SeattlePeople always ask how they can help. Given concerns about corruption, waste, and mismanagement, how can one actually help women like Meena and defeat modern slavery? Is there anything an ordinary person can do?A starting point is to be brutally realistic about the complexities of achieving change. To be blunt, humanitarians sometimes exaggerate and oversell, eliding pitfalls. They sometimes torture frail data until it yields the demanded "proof" of success. Partly this is because the causes are worthy and inspiring; those who study education for girls, for example, naturally believe in it. As we"ll see, the result is that the research often isn"t conducted with the same rigor as is found in, say, examinations of the effectiveness of toothpastes. Aid groups are also reluctant to acknowledge mistakes, partly because frank discussion of blunders is an impediment in soliciting contributions.The reality is that past efforts to a.s.sist girls have sometimes backfired. In 1993, Senator Tom Harkin wanted to help Bangladeshi girls laboring in sweatshops, so he introduced legislation that would have banned imports made by workers under the age of fourteen. Bangladeshi factories promptly fired tens of thousands of these young girls, and many of them ended up in brothels and are presumably now dead of AIDS.Yet many forms of a.s.sistance-particularly in health and education-have an excellent record. Consider the work of Frank Grijalva, the princ.i.p.al of the Overlake School in Redmond, Washington, a fine private school with 450 students in grades five through twelve. Annual tuition hovers around $22,000, and most of the kids are raised in a sheltered upper-middle-cla.s.s environment. Grijalva was looking for a way to teach his students about how the other half lives."It became clear that we, as a very privileged community, needed to be a bigger, more positive force in the world," Grijalva recalled. Frank heard about Bernard Krisher, a former Newsweek Newsweek correspondent who was so appalled by poverty in Cambodia that he formed an aid group, American a.s.sistance for Cambodia. Rescuing girls from brothels is important, Krisher believes, but the best way to save them is to prevent them from being trafficked in the first place-which means keeping them in school. So American a.s.sistance for Cambodia focuses on educating rural children, especially girls. Bernie Krisher"s signature program is the Rural School Project. For $13,000, a donor can establish a school in a Cambodian village. The donation is matched by funds from the World Bank and again by the Asian Development Bank. correspondent who was so appalled by poverty in Cambodia that he formed an aid group, American a.s.sistance for Cambodia. Rescuing girls from brothels is important, Krisher believes, but the best way to save them is to prevent them from being trafficked in the first place-which means keeping them in school. So American a.s.sistance for Cambodia focuses on educating rural children, especially girls. Bernie Krisher"s signature program is the Rural School Project. For $13,000, a donor can establish a school in a Cambodian village. The donation is matched by funds from the World Bank and again by the Asian Development Bank.Grijalva had a brainstorm: His students could sponsor a school in Cambodia and use it as a way of emphasizing the importance of public service. Initially the response from students and parents was polite but cautious, but then the attacks of 9/11 took place, and suddenly the community was pa.s.sionately concerned with the larger world and engaged in this project. The students conducted bake sales, car washes, and talent shows, and also educated themselves about Cambodia"s history of war and genocide. The school was built in Pailin, a Cambodian town on the Thai border that is notorious for cheap brothels that cater to Thai men.In February 2003, the school construction was completed, and Grijalva led a delegation of nineteen students from Overlake School to Cambodia for the opening. A cynic might say that the money for the visit would have been better spent building another Cambodian school, but in fact that visit was an essential field trip and learning opportunity for those American students. They lugged along boxes of school supplies, but as they approached Pailin by car, they realized that Cambodia"s needs were greater than they ever could have imagined. The dirt-and-gravel road to Pailin was so deeply rutted that it was barely pa.s.sable, and they saw a bulldozer overturned beside a crater-it had hit a land mine.When the Americans reached the Cambodian school, they saw a sign declaring it the OVERLAKE SCHOOL OVERLAKE SCHOOL in English and Khmer script. At the ribbon cutting, the Americans were welcomed by a sea of excited Cambodians-led by a princ.i.p.al who was missing a leg, a landmine victim himself. Cambodian men then had an average of only 2.6 years of education, and Cambodian women averaged just 1.7 years, so a new school was appreciated in a way the Americans could barely fathom. in English and Khmer script. At the ribbon cutting, the Americans were welcomed by a sea of excited Cambodians-led by a princ.i.p.al who was missing a leg, a landmine victim himself. Cambodian men then had an average of only 2.6 years of education, and Cambodian women averaged just 1.7 years, so a new school was appreciated in a way the Americans could barely fathom.The school dedication-and the full week in Cambodia-left an indelible impression on the American students. So Overlake students and parents decided to forge an ongoing relationship with its namesake in Cambodia. The Americans funded an English teacher at the school and arranged for an Internet connection for e-mail. They built a playground and sent books. Then, in 2006, the American school decided to send delegations annually, dispatching students and teachers during spring vacation to teach English and arts to the Cambodian pupils. And in 2007, the group decided to a.s.sist a school in Ghana as well, and to send a delegation there.[image]Kun Sokkea in front of the Overlake School in Cambodia (Nicholas D. Kristof) "This project is simply the most meaningful and worthwhile initiative that I have undertaken in my thirty-six years in education," Frank Grijalva said. The Overlake School in Cambodia is indeed an extraordinary place. A bridge has washed out, so you have to walk across a stream to reach it, but it looks nothing like the dilapidated buildings that you see in much of the developing world. There are 270 students, ranging in age from six to fifteen. The English teacher is university-educated and speaks good English. Most stunning of all, when we dropped by, the sixth graders were busy sending e-mails from their Yahoo accounts-to the kids at Overlake School in America.One of those writing an e-mail was Kun Sokkea, a thirteen-year-old girl who would soon be the first in her family ever to graduate from elementary school. Her father had died of AIDS, and her mother was sick with the same disease and needed to be nursed constantly. Kun Sokkea is rail-thin, a bit gangly, with long, stringy black hair. She is re