The Grey Man

by John Curtis

  Russell hadn't been to Thailand, so we decided he should go up to see for himself the work I'd been doing on the rescue front and in the villages. We flew to Chiang Mai via Bangkok and as soon as I stepped off the plane I felt as though I was coming home again. It was a combination of the heady smells – good and bad – of Asia, the welcoming smiles of the people, and the knowledge that there was still work to be done. Or so I thought.

  Things had changed in Chiang Mai in the eighteen months since I'd been back in Australia. I took Russell to the red-light district of Santi Tam but was surprised to see how quiet the area had become. Brothels that had boasted wall-to-wall girls were shut down, or largely empty. We went to a couple of places that I suspected of offering underage girls, but found none there. It turned out that on my first trip I was catching the tail end of the overt trade in the north of the country. Since then there had been a crackdown and the illegal business had been driven further underground. However, it hadn't disappeared completely – rather, it had changed its face. What we did find were pimps and karaoke bars where Russell and I were shown a series of photos of girls who could be delivered to our hotel rooms. I still couldn't get a lead on any underage kids, though.

  ‘Great,’ I said to Russell only half jokingly, ‘we've set up a charity and raised money to help underage kids stuck in the sex industry and there aren't any left!’

  Any illusion we might have had that the problem had disappeared was shattered when we went to Chiang Saen in Chiang Rai province to visit a shelter for trafficked and abused kids run by a gutsy woman called Kru Nam. When the problem of child prostitution was more high profile she just used to walk into brothels and simply drag the kids out; as a result, she had received numerous death threats. When we got there we found the shelter packed almost to overflowing with about eighty kids. She also had a shelter in Chiang Rai

  ‘This problem is still very much with us,’ Kru Nam explained to us as we walked through the kids' dormitories. A small girl was walking with her, holding her hand. ‘About 40 per cent of the children here were trafficked by their parents to earn money as beggars; about 30 per cent were rescued or escaped from brothels, and about 30 per cent were abused within their own families. In many cases the parents are high on ya ba.’

  ‘There's no sign that things are getting better?’ Russell asked.

  She shook her head. ‘We take in more and more children until we can take no more.’ It seemed that rather than disappearing or being cleaned up, the problems of child trafficking and abuse had simply moved underground. The young, shy girl holding Kru Nam's hand had been trafficked for sex and then rescued. She rarely talked, but would sometimes smile at us. Clearly, it would take time for her to heal.

  Travelling with someone for an extended period is the best way to get to know them and, if you're not compatible, the best way to piss each other off. I hardly knew Russell at all when I agreed to take him to Thailand on a two-week trip, but fortunately I soon found that he was a very easy person to travel with. He's organised but easygoing, and he's got a good sense of humour – a prerequisite to work on our team. A good fit for The Grey Man – and this was why I knew Russell was the right man for the job from the start – is the sort of person who has some life experience, who can be flexible and maintain their sense of humour in the face of everything from almost unspeakable evil through to petty interjurisdictional bureaucracy.

  Over the years since we formed the charity we've had quite a few very serious, very earnest people try to volunteer. While I want people who are committed to fulfilling our mission, I don't want crusaders. What I didn't want in The Grey Man were the types of zealots I'd seen working in organisations such as IJM; these people, who often saw Jesus and the Bible as the only and highest authorities, and were intolerant of other belief systems, were unable to see the shades of grey in human actions. They approached the problem of child trafficking and prostitution as though they were on a mission to stamp out the sex industry altogether. The Grey Man is not anti-prostitution between consenting adults, but nor do we necessarily support it. We simply accept that it has always existed and will always exist, but it is not acceptable for children to be dragged into that world. Zealots cause problems because they tend to be inflexible, and it can be dangerous if you're trying to run a covert operation and someone starts acting like a medieval crusader who thinks he has God on his side. Plus a person who espouses strong religious beliefs and wants to convert the world is not going to do a good job working undercover as a paedophile, or hanging around girly bars in south-east Asia trying to pick up information on offenders and underage kids while keeping a low profile. If I was the praying kind I would pray, ‘Jesus, protect me from your followers’, but that lumps them all together and we have worked with many wonderful Christian people over the years.

  The New Life Center in Chiang Mai, for example, is a Christian organisation, but their focus is on educating kids and getting them vocational training rather than on converting them. If the girls want to get involved with Christianity they can, but there is no pressure to do so. Another of our friends is Father Shay Cullen in the Philippines, who does great work. At the other end of the spectrum, I checked out the literature from a shelter run by westerners and their brochure on their work with rescued kids proudly opened with: Praise the Lord – 100 per cent of the children in our care have converted to Christianity. I walked out of that place straightaway, as there was no mistaking their agenda. On one hand, I could concede it was better for a kid to be in a Christian refuge being pressured to convert rather than being stuck in a brothel giving oral sex to men, but on the other hand, that sort of environment represents another (albeit much milder) form of abuse because it operates from an assumption of cultural superiority. As there was a spectrum of Christian groups available, we always worked with the ones that truly embodied Jesus' teachings, as opposed to the fundamentalist organisations. I was only going to hand over rescued kids to a Christian-run shelter or organisation if I could be sure they would be safe there, and if I could satisfy myself that the girls' personal beliefs would be respected and not subverted.

  Having learned that the problems of child trafficking and abuse had been pushed underground and further north into the border regions, Russell and I travelled to Mae Sai, where we met Sompop Jantraka, a Thai guy who has been working with abused and trafficked kids since the late 1980s.

  Sompop ran an organisation called the Development and Education Programme for Daughters and Communities (DEPDC). They would go into villages and get girls into education before they were trafficked. They also provided free education and support for girls who had been sexually abused, trafficked and sold into prostitution. The ‘daughters’ that Sompop and his people look after came primarily from the hill tribe areas, where we'd been working, but also include kids who have been trafficked from Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and even as far afield as Yunnan province in China.

  Sompop gave us a presentation first, and it covered many of the things that we, too, were involved in or wanted to get into, such as prevention programs and education; however, Sompop's organisation was not involved in actual rescue work. It was immediately clear to me that we could dovetail nicely with Sompop's work, but we were outsiders and Sompop had a long and proud tradition of success in Thailand, as evidenced by a good deal of favourable media coverage that formed part of his presentation.

  After I'd given him our fledgling PowerPoint presentation, and stressed our track record in undercover operations and rescues, I said to him, ‘There's one thing I do want to make clear. If we are to work with you, The Grey Man does not want any public recognition here in Thailand for our work. Your organisation and the police can take the credit for any rescues we do.’

  Sompop blinked a couple of times and waited a moment before speaking. ‘So, you don't want anything?’

  ‘All we want is to rescue kids,’ Russell said.

  Whether one likes it or not, publicity, I have since learned, is an integral ingredient in t
he recipe for success for any NGO. Organisations fight – sometimes against each other – for column centimetres in newspapers and airtime on radio and TV to highlight their work and thereby engender support and generate fundraising. Sompop couldn't believe that we didn't want to be part of that.

  Of course, I wasn't being entirely selfless. It was true that I would have been far happier to remain in the shadows and go about my business with as few people as possible knowing about it, but I'd also learned from my time back in Australia that we needed funds to do our work and to achieve that we had to hit the speaking circuit. I was grateful that I hadn't yet had to court the media, but I was being deadly serious when I told Sompop we were not interested in coverage in Thailand. Eventually I did start getting media exposure in Australia and that was good, as that is our fundraising base, but in Thailand we were operating undercover so I didn't want my face or the pictures of our operatives being splashed across the local press. In fact, I didn't want the paedophiles and pimps to have any inkling at all that the next westerner they met looking for a kid in a bar or brothel might be an undercover investigator. I explained this to Sompop.

  ‘Ahhh, I see,’ Sompop said. He and his people had a long conversation in rapid Thai, which I had trouble following, but it seemed to be positive. ‘Okay,’ he said at last, ‘I think we will be able to work together very well. Let us take this further.’

  After we met with Sompop, Russell and I caught up with another Thai charity worker, Kru Ngaow (Kru is an honorific, meaning teacher), who ran a shelter at Mae Sai called Childlife; this one mostly cared for kids who'd been sent across the border from Burma by their drug-addicted parents to beg. That meeting confirmed that the problem of trafficking and associated evils had most definitely not gone away. Kru Ngaow's a Christian and he holds a regular monthly meeting with all the other Christian NGOs in the district where they share intelligence. He seemed like a good man. We agreed to work with him, too, and I told him I would arrange for our in-country guy, whom we were yet to appoint, to meet with them.

  Frank Weicks, who had left IJM, began working for us in 2008 as our director of operations and did some good work liaising with a Rotary club in the northern Thai town of Fang. Having a link with a local club gave us some extra kudos when dealing with Rotary back in Australia. Frank was also instrumental in helping us get the paperwork set up to allow The Grey Man to accept tax-deductible donations in Australia through Rotary.

  Unfortunately, Frank's own business providing training to police forces in south-east Asia was taking up more and more of his time and after a couple of months working for us he had to leave us to concentrate on that.

  I'd realised that trying to run everything by myself, from thousands of kilometres away in Australia, was just not working. I'd probably give myself a heart attack if I kept trying. Russell agreed with me that we needed a paid full-time presence on the ground in Thailand – someone who could be our operations manager and at the same time be a repository of information and local contacts. We chatted about some possible candidates and I told Russell about Rick, the half-Thai, half-American former Special Forces guy I'd worked with at IJM.

  We travelled back to Chiang Mai in August 2008 and I called Rick and set up an appointment with him in a restaurant. When we got to the place Rick already had a Mekong whisky in front of him and was leaning back in his chair and smoking. He got up and we shook hands and I introduced him to Russell. I rated Rick as a good operator, but I also knew that he had a laid-back style and liked to party when the opportunity presented. This was the side of him that Russell was seeing now, and I wasn't sure that he was making the best impression on our co-founder.

  Rick had left IJM before the NGO pulled out of Thailand altogether, but his former partner Panom had been left high and dry as the Director of Operations for a rescue organisation no longer functioning in Thailand. Rick seemed quite interested in coming to work for us, but after dinner Russell told me that he wasn't convinced he was the right man for the job. I then floated the idea of Panom as a candidate and Russell said he was keen to meet him.

  Even though IJM had now pulled out, Panom was apparently still on the trail of paedophiles, and looking for kids to rescue as a freelancer. I remembered Panom as quite a prickly character and a bit arrogant, but those aren't necessarily bad qualities to have when you're fighting a seemingly unending problem, often in the face of insurmountable bureaucracy and apathy. While I personally liked Rick more, Panom had plenty of runs on the board already; he had been IJM's director of operations after Frank.

  Panom was in Bangkok and we were in Chiang Mai, so Russell and I organised a telephone conference with him. Russell liked Panom's straightforward style right from the start and after our conversation Russell suggested that we employ him. Panom had good contacts with the cops in Police Region 5, which covered Chiang Mai and northern Thailand, and he set up some meetings for us with them. The police seemed happy with what we were proposing and, to be honest, it was good to know that for the first time we would have some official cover and authority to do the work we'd already been doing for some time.

  One of Panom's mates was a police major who, like Panom, seemed pretty gung-ho, and was keen to work with us to bust paedophiles and traffickers. He'd had some notable successes already, evidenced by press clippings that I later saw. He was a good guy, but like a lot of Thai men I've met he was very image and career-conscious. To get ahead in the Thai police it wasn't enough just to be good at your job; you had to be seen in the media as good at doing your job. One thing I noticed about Thai society in general was that it was very status-focused, and quite materialistic, which to me seemed at odds with the more austere, inward-looking messages of their Buddhist religion.

  Anyway, we now had a go-getter on the payroll, in the form of Panom; we had a willing ally in the local police and it looked like we were well and truly in business, officially. At the end of our second trip I took Russell up to the border to meet Sila and the other Lahu guys, and to see the kids that we'd helped support in school. I must admit that when we got to Sila's village I was surprised to see that work on the trekking lodge was virtually complete, as I didn't think I'd given him enough money. It turned out that he'd been able to get some more funding for the lodge from employees at Nike, which has a big shoe factory in northern Thailand.

  Sila had given me his word that he would put the money I'd given him to good use and I had been foolish to doubt him. The building was nicely finished and when I walked out onto the rear balcony the view of the village and hills was as spectacular as I'd remembered. There was a long dining table and benches outside and Russell and I sat with Sila, drinking hill tribe tea and eating lychees that his people were growing now that opium cultivation had been all but eradicated. It was good to see my friends again, and good to see that you could make a difference to people's lives without destroying or curbing their culture.

  Sila spoke to Russell and me about the possibility of The Grey Man replicating what we had done in his village – supporting children at risk via paying their school fees – in another hill tribe village, Baan Hoy May Yom. We agreed and Sila offered to take us there to celebrate New Year's with him and the locals. It was a great adventure. When we arrived we were treated to a traditional welcoming ceremony where villagers poured water from a bottle so we could wash our hands, and then they danced for us. I felt like Lord Jim himself.

  As well as our assistance with school fees, Sila proposed another good idea to help keep kids out of the hands of the traffickers. Even families that could afford to send their kids to school sometimes didn't because of another obstacle – transport. Some of the hill tribe villages are so remote that a kid might have to travel thirty kilometres or more to get to the nearest school. Sila thought that if we could help fund a school transport scheme we could reach out to even more kids and families. There was anecdotal evidence of children being accosted by traffickers while walking through remote areas, so there was an added benefit to getting on board
with this.

  We met with people in Baan Hoy May Yom and after some hard negotiation we settled on an amount to fund a pickup truck, a driver and fuel. After that we had a huge feast for New Year's, which continued from breakfast through to dinner, with roasted freshly slaughtered pork and all sorts of local vegetables and fruits. Everyone was drinking copious amounts of whisky and beer. I don't drink a lot so I stayed pretty much in control and when Sila announced, after midnight, that it was time to go back to his village, I offered to drive his motorcycle, with him riding on the back.

  It was a pretty hair-raising trip, riding up and down hills on a narrow, badly rutted dirt road with the jungle pressing in on either side of us. A few times I nearly lost it on the corners, or swerving to miss holes in the road. The headlight on the bike didn't work and the brakes weren't too flash either. Coming down a hill I pushed on the footbrake lever and it fell off! It clattered down and was hanging off the motorcycle as we free-wheeled down the hill. ‘Holy fuuuuuuuuck, hang on!’ I yelled back to Sila.

  The footbrake mechanism, dangling from the motorbike, got caught on a rock and all of a sudden we were flying arse over head into the jungle, where we hit a tree. Sila slammed into my back as a result of the sudden stop and the pair of us landed sprawling in the bush. Groaning, we picked ourselves up and then the bike, astounded that neither of us had been hurt, bar a few scratches and bruises. Amazingly, the motorcycle was still working, albeit with no brakes.