by John Curtis
One thing I liked about Rita and Allan and one of the reasons I got on so well with them was that their charity was non-religious. As I'll discuss in more detail later, too many of the NGOs I came across were Christian organisations who were as or more interested in converting the locals to Christianity than in helping them in practical ways. Only about 11 per cent of the charities involved in working with at-risk kids in Thailand are non-religious. I have no problem with Christianity or Christians and many religious charities are doing a lot of good, but I don't like seeing someone trying to impose their ways on another culture and I was saddened to learn that some of the hill tribe villages had been totally converted to Christianity or Buddhism. Again, there's nothing wrong with religion if you are a believer, and the people of the Christian villages were actually doing quite well out of overseas donations, but it seemed to me that it had come at the expense of their own culture.
Kids Ark worked mostly among the Lahu people of northern Thailand. The Lahu have a beautiful belief system that is very much tied to the land and nature. They believe that spirits of the forests surround their villages, and that all humans came originally from a sacred gourd. Occasionally they'll sacrifice an animal, but it is always eaten afterwards.
I liked being up in the hills and had some great experiences there. I went out on a trek with a local woman who rescued elephants. We travelled down a river on bamboo rafts and stopped at places along the river to treat elephants that had developed wounds from the friction of their harnesses while working. We got to bathe with the elephants as well, which was cool.
On one of my visits to the Lahu I met a guy called Sila, the President of the Lahu Association. Sila was trying to preserve his people's religion and culture. I'd gone with Rita and Allan to the village of Baan Pong Hai to witness the dedication of a new community centre. Sila put me up in his house and I just loved being in a traditional bamboo hut. Back in Sila's village, though, I got an insight into the very real problems that plagued this seemingly peaceful part of the world. ‘Many Lahu girls are being sent to the cities into karaoke bars,’ Sila told me over a drink one night. Karaoke bars were, I knew, a local euphemism for brothels.
Tragically, Sila also told me that AIDS had had a large impact in the village and that many of their people had died, including one of Sila's sisters. Amid the beauty of the hills and the tribes who had lived there for centuries I was being confronted for the first time with the stark reality of the problem I had come to Thailand to try to combat.
Sila took me to a bamboo grove a short distance from his village. This was where they buried their dead. In the relative cool there was a quietness not usually found in Thailand. Many of those buried there had died of AIDS, but on a bright note, infection rates were dropping and the support of Kids Ark had helped to dramatically improve the quality of life in the local villages.
Like other hill tribes, the Lahu once had a reputation for growing and running opium, however a program instigated by the King of Thailand had weaned the Lahu off their economic addiction to drugs. The king had introduced incentive programs to get the Lahu to switch their agricultural operations from drugs to foods such as lychees.
Sila explained to me that one of the other ways the local community was now trying to support itself was by running treks in the hills for foreign tourists. One of his dreams was to build a lodge where trekkers could stay overnight, learn about the local village and spend some time – and money – there. I thought it was a great idea. Sila invited me to go on a trek sometime, and when I returned to his village a few weeks later, I took Sila up on his offer. I specified, though, that I wanted it to be a survival-oriented trek where the Lahu would show me their traditional ways of living off the land. Much of the forest had been cleared around the village, for building and firewood, so we had to trek for about an hour just to get to the forest. Once we were there, though, I had a ball.
The Lahu showed me plants that could be used for medicinal purposes, and they cooked up great meals, including curries, that they seasoned and spiced with wild foods. There were mushrooms, banana flowers and native limes and we ate chickens they'd brought with them and killed in the forest. I asked one of the older Lahu, Janna, how they lit fires today. He showed me a cigarette lighter. ‘What about the old days?’ I asked him. He made a motion with his hands of striking two rocks together to produce sparks.
My mate Mel De Weese, an American survival expert and former Navy Seal, had shown me how to light a fire essentially by sawing one piece of bamboo across another (it is a bit more complicated than that, but it is an elegant method). Mel had learned it in the Philippine jungles from the Negrito people. I thought now was as good a time as any to try the technique Mel had shown me, so I cut some bamboo and demonstrated how it worked. Janna and the other Lahu were impressed. They got me to demonstrate this apparently long-lost skill back at the village to an assembly of their relatives and ever since that day they have treated me with great respect. Whenever I visit the village Janna always greets me by mimicking the motions of the bamboo fire-saw method.
At the end of the trek I spent a bit of time with Sila and his family and he told me more about his plan to bring some more money into his village. He took me to the top of a steep hill, just beyond his place. From the crest there was a fantastic view out over his valley towards green-clad hills stretching away into the distance. It was an extraordinarily peaceful place and you got the sense that little had changed there for centuries.
‘I want to build the trekking lodge here,’ Sila said to me.
He explained that if they could build a lodge on this scenic spot then tourists would have an incentive to stay longer and get to know something of the hill tribe culture instead of merely going for a trek and then heading straight back to Chiang Mai. I thought it was an excellent and quite visionary idea.
I'd learned that child trafficking was a symptom of poverty and debt, so any project that could benefit the village's economy might have a flow-on effect to the families who lived there. Back in Chiang Mai, I got on a computer and designed Sila a brochure to help publicise his treks, and then had it printed. We called it Red Lahu Treks (Sila's people were called the Red Lahu, as distinct from the White, Black or Yellow Lahu). I decided to give Sila A$600 towards the construction of his proposed lodge, but I wasn't sure if anything would come of my donation. However, Sila seemed like an honest guy, who was truly committed to improving life for his people, and not just himself.
In Chiang Mai I went back to the unpleasant business of hanging around in bars and brothels, looking for a kid or kids to rescue. It was still a frustrating task; sometimes I thought I'd found very young girls only to learn I'd been fooled by the generally youthful appearance of the Thais. I knew from my discussions with Sila and others that the problem was real, but I was having no luck in trying to tackle it.
‘We have a young girl,’ a pimp finally said to me one night. ‘Only fifteen.’ I was at a low-end brothel in Chiang Mai. I was dubious at first, as I'd had other girls offered to me who were clearly much older than their hawkers had claimed, but when I met her I could see that this girl was clearly underage. Lek was a pretty girl from the Akha, another of the hill tribes on the Burmese border.
I paid the asking price for Lek, which was 1500 baht, or about sixty Australian dollars at the time. Lek commanded a premium because of her age – an adult sex worker at such a seedy establishment would probably have cost me less than half that amount. I was led into a small room; we were left alone and Lek began to take off her clothes.
‘No,’ I said to her in Thai, holding up my hand. ‘I just want to talk, Lek.’
She looked at me, suspicion plain in a young face that had already seen too much of life. ‘Talk?’
‘Lek, I don't want to have sex with you. I want to take you away from here – not for me, but to take you home. Would you like that?’
Lek clearly didn't trust me at first, and I couldn't blame her, but after our allotted time was up, and we
hadn't had sex, she eventually agreed to meet me outside of work, in a restaurant. The next day I was waiting for her. She arrived, nervously looking around, and I ordered her a soft drink. As she sipped her drink I explained that I had come to Thailand to try to help underage girls who had been forced into prostitution. I asked about her background and she told me that she had started working at the brothel of her own accord. I realised this was possible, but it still came as a bit of a surprise to hear it from her mouth.
‘I could get you out, though,’ I said to her. ‘I'm willing to pay for you to get an education. I know some good people who run a school.’ Kids Ark had a school in Chiang Mai that cared for homeless and orphaned kids. I offered to give Lek 3000 baht (around A$120) a month; this would cover her board and school fees, and there would still be a bit of pocket money left over. I figured that this amount was around the average wage that a lowly paid worker could hope to make.
‘I not sure,’ she said, looking at me over the rim of her glass.
I don't know what I had expected from her, but even though she claimed she had become a sex worker of her own volition I thought that she would have immediately jumped at the alternative I was proposing.
Lek agreed to think about my offer and we met again, but in the end she said no thanks. It had come down to money. Yes, Lek could have received a better education and perhaps made something more of her life, but in the brothel she could earn in a night the same amount of money I was proposing to give her for a month. She could leave prostitution, but it would be at the expense of her mobile phone and her nice clothes. Even though I could understand Lek's decision I was pissed off about it. This was the first of many hard lessons I was to learn.
I went to see Rita and Allan at Kids Ark and told them what had happened. ‘John,’ Rita said, leaning across her desk and laying a hand on mine, ‘what you are trying to do is a great thing, but you are looking at this problem from the tail end.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘You are treating the symptoms of this problem, not the cause. You have to realise that some of these girls will be in debt, or will be providing for their families. They may simply be unable to afford to leave the work they do. You need to focus more on the front end.’
Rita was right. The other analogy I'd heard used was that it was better to build a fence at the top of a cliff than to have an ambulance parked at the bottom to treat anyone who fell over the edge. It all meant the same thing, and at that point I realised that the seed money I'd given Sila to build the trekking lodge might prove more valuable than any rescue operations I might undertake. Certainly at that stage I'd had zero success on the rescue front, although according to the authorities and experts the problem of child prostitution and trafficking was still very much alive. At the time, UNICEF estimated that 1.2 million women and children are trafficked throughout the world each year. I knew in my heart I couldn't give up searching for kids to rescue, because I couldn't simply write them all off as lost causes. Besides, I had promised my daughter that I would rescue five girls before I came home. But I did realise that Rita was right and I would need to adopt a two-pronged approach to the mission I'd set myself.
I took the three-hour bus ride back to Sila's village; the trip gave me time to think through the details of a new plan. It would be based on a program that Kids Ark already had in place in which hill tribe villagers were supplied with basic foodstuffs on the condition that they kept their female children in school. When I sat down with Sila I told him how I was keen to implement the same plan in his village. ‘You pick out twenty girls from the poorest families in the village and I will pay their school fees and provide their families with food.’
He thought it over and nodded. Sila could see the merits of allowing the girls to get an education. Sila is very progressive and was already a big believer in education, having been awarded a degree himself. Perhaps he was thinking of his own sister, and how she had been forced by economic circumstances to go looking for work in the city, and the terrible consequences of this step.
As much as I liked what Kids Ark was doing, and as pleased as I was to be directing some of my army back pay into a worthwhile program (which continues today with funding from The Grey Man), I still wanted to be back at the sharp end, looking for kids to rescue. Before coming to Thailand I'd read about a US-based charity called the International Justice Mission, or IJM, who were in the business of rescuing kids from prostitution and finding aftercare for them. They had seemed like a logical organisation for me to contact and offer my services to, but it was proving hard to find a local contact number for them. After three weeks, I decided to call their head office in America and was put in touch with a guy called Frank Weicks, IJM's director of operations in Chiang Mai. I called Frank and he agreed to meet me at an open-air foodcourt in Chiang Mai called the Kalare Centre. The centre consisted of about fifty shops, but there were also small vendors offering clothing, crafts, tours and massages.
We met in the large dining area, which can seat hundreds of people. At night-time it would be full but it was relatively unoccupied when we met late morning. Frank was in his sixties, a distinguished, likeable guy with a mane of silver hair and a slow, deep voice. I quickly realised he'd brought another couple of operatives with him who had taken up their position at a nearby table and were keeping watch on me. I guessed I wasn't supposed to know they were with Frank, but although they were pretty good, the occasional guarded glance told me they were his backup.
I played along and learned over a beer that Frank was a former police officer who had worked in child protection in New Orleans. He'd transferred to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and had been posted to Thailand with them, but when his tour was up and it was time for retirement he'd elected to stay on in the country, taking the job with IJM. He asked a bit about my background, but he seemed pretty iffy about me. ‘I'm not sure we've got anything we could use you on right now,’ he said.
From what I could gather from Frank, IJM seemed more geared towards large-scale raids on brothels, rounding up everyone in the place and then sorting through them, looking for girls and boys who had been trafficked and were there against their will. IJM was a Christian organisation and they had a philosophical problem with prostitution in general, whether or not the sex workers were there of their own volition. As a result they had copped a lot of flak from Empower, the sex workers' association in Thailand, which had criticised IJM's heavy-handed methods. Having said all that, the organisation had also rescued plenty of kids who had been forced into a life they hated. Just as Frank was dancing around me, I wasn't 100 per cent sure I would be the right fit for them, either. My experience with Lek had taught me already that for whatever reason some girls, even the underage ones, did not want to be rescued.
Just when I was thinking the whole meeting was going down the tubes and that we were both ready to get up and walk out, Frank said, ‘So, you also mentioned you'd served in the military in Australia?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘in the commandos.’
Frank straightened in his seat and I saw a spark of interest ignite in his eyes. ‘Special Forces?’
‘Yes.’
It hadn't seemed like a big deal to me, but those two words had turned a key. ‘Now that is interesting,’ Frank said and ordered another round of drinks. ‘Maybe there is something we can use you on.’
‘I'm here to work. I'm not going anywhere.’
Frank's bodyguards seemed to pick up on the change in the mood between us and I could see them relaxing at their table as they tucked into their food. Frank leaned forward on his elbows, closing the gap between us. He lowered his voice a little. ‘We've had our eyes on some places in the less savoury parts of town,’ he said. I waited for him to explain. ‘In fact, one or two of these places have been considered too risky for us to send our people into . . .’
I leaned in as well. ‘Frank, send me.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Send me. I don't care.’
It probably sounds like I was full of bravado, but the truth was that despite the positive projects I'd been able to contribute to in Sila's village, and the promise of hope I'd seen in some of the work Kids Ark was doing, I was still hell-bent on completing the mission I'd told my daughter about, and my own state of mind still reflected the fact that I had no plans to return to Australia. I truly didn't care what happened to me – not because I was brave, but just because I saw no future for my life. I don't think I'd go so far as to say I had a death wish, more that I had no great desire to go on living aimlessly; I was ambivalent about it all. Frank and I finished our meal and shook hands, agreeing to meet again.
At our next meeting Frank outlined the mission he had in mind for me. As well as raiding brothels, IJM was hunting western paedophiles. Frank pushed a dossier across the table to me. I opened it and saw a photo of a very ordinary looking middle-aged white man. ‘We need more information on this guy . . . we need you to find him, follow him, and see where he gets his kids from,’ he said. ‘If you can meet with him we'll follow up with our guys and set up a sting.’
I flicked through the file. It was pretty comprehensive, listing bars the man – a British expat who I'll refer to as Richard Davenport (not his real name) – had frequented and including comments on where he had stayed and what his sexual tastes ran to. I had come to Thailand to rescue kids, not hunt criminals, and I had no police training, but in the absence of anything else to do, I was drawn in by Frank's offer of some action. Perhaps through finding and following the man Frank was hunting I could also find the young people I was sure needed help.
Now I trawled the bars and brothels of Chiang Mai with a new purpose, and I had to change my modus operandi. I found myself in the distasteful position of having to strike up conversations with the types of people I'd deliberately avoided up until now. Some of the men IJM hunted were expats living in Thailand and others were regular sex tourists. They had a diverse range of backgrounds, with nothing in common except their weakness for children. We hunted businessmen, retirees, university professors, a former judge and even a former Australian Federal Police officer. The men came from all over the world – there were Australians, Britons, Germans, French, Swedes, you name it. I was surprised at the number of paedophiles IJM was monitoring and hunting, but I soon learned that finding a ‘ped’ didn't necessarily make it easier to find and rescue kids at risk. More often than not foreign paedophiles operated in locally established networks, grooming the children of Thai people they might know, or preying on young girls who worked on the streets of Chiang Mai as flower sellers.