Somaly Mam, from Cambodian Prostitute to Activist

Somaly Mam was not her original name. Like many people, she's had many names, but Somaly was in a position to choose a name and she embraced the name that would give her the most freedom of identity. As a child she was called Ya, and sometimes just Non, or "Little One". When she was taken by a old man as a child and became his slave, she was called Aya, and upon occasion Viriya. Years later a man who said he was her uncle, and who became a father-figure to the young unloved girl, gave her the name Somaly, meaning "the necklace of flowers lost in the virgin forest". She never knew what her own parents had called her, being an orphan from a young age, but she knew the love steeped in this name and the bequeathal of acceptance for her pure soul, and so she claimed this name. Typical Khmer advice is never to find out about your past, and her "uncle" told her to look toward the future. He gave her a future with his love, and as her parent-figure and adoptive siblings, she had the foundation of her success in escaping prostitution later on.

When she was quite young, the old man came to her village and took her away with promises of reuniting her with her parents. No one cared for the small orphan, and very likely no believed his promises, but no one interfered. She was taken away and became the slave of the old man, whom she was to respectfully call grandfather. He was an inveterate gambler, a wastrel and young Somaly had to work hard carrying morning wash water and doing other tasks to earns coinage to feed "her" grandfather, who never worked. When Somaly became a teenager, and started growing breasts, the old man began touching her and Somaly did all she could to escape his attentions by quickly doing her household duties and then fleeing the tiny hut. One day grandfather sent her to a merchant to buy some oil, but in hindsight she realized that she was to repay her grandfather's gambling debts by giving the merchant her virginity. This was the first rape of many, and she was only about twelve.

She had no one to really turn to, because her "maternal uncle" was trumped by the "grandfather". Her "uncle" who she now calls "father" explained to her that there is much suffering in life, and no matter how much life hurts, one must remain silent. This seems to be strong Khmer philosophy.  His advice was, "If you want to stay alive, grow a dam kor tree in front of your house." The dam kor is the silk-cotton tree, but the word, kor, also means mute. To survive, you must remain silent.

When she was about 14, she was married by her grandfather to a soldier in his mid-20s, a surly aggressive man who raped her violently multiple times on their wedding night and every night afterwards when he wasn't fighting. She hated marriage. Marriage put women in a prison. Her husband was particularly violent, slamming her head again and again against the hut structure, gashing her face with a fingernail kept intentionally long, abusing her in any way if the food she prepared wasn't to his liking or anything at all didn't strike him like he wanted. He started taking shots at her with his military rifle, but in all this, she learned that to the Khmer you must not let the fire that is outside come inside your house, and the hearth fire must not be allowed outside. You don't talk about what happens in your household.

When her husband was away, she worked at a clinic to bring in some coins. She worked at night for 30 pounds of rice every month, a high wage. All she wanted was work, she wasn't frightened of the dead, she lived with a husband who was worse. The hospitals were notorious for "killing" people. No one was a proper nurse or a trained doctor; treatments were on trial and error basis and washing hands was not a habit. Treatments were based on traditional belief: young mothers hemorrhaged on the inside and developed fever (puerperal fever) but this was interpreted as a dead person has used the labor to enter the body and perform a dance. If the young mothers survived, custom dictated that they drink a glass of a boy's urine and lay a coal fire under their beds as well as eat a lot of pepper to regain their energy and lighten their skin.

When she was fifteen she got her period for the first time. Another "nurse" explained to her what this meant. Her husband was away fighting but the doctors at the clinic preyed on the young women and there was nothing they could do but submit. Again, though being raped was not her fault, she lived in fear of her husband finding out because in Cambodia, if a married woman has sex with another man, it is believed she should kill herself. Somaly did try. She swallowed a lot of Russian sleeping drops but only woke the next day stunned and bleary.

She only remained married a few months and then her husband no longer returned from fighting. Her grandfather however came for her and took her to Phnom Penh where he sold her into prostitution to feed his gambling habit. The first day when she refused to service a patron, she was raped by the owner's husband and beaten violently with his crutch and then raped by both of the brothel guards. The next day she didn't refuse a patron ... there was just no choice.

Many parents or relatives sell their daughters to a brothel and the price depends on their freshness and beauty, their cleverness and their connection to the seller. Today some girls are kidnapped into prostitution, but that didn't happen so much when Somaly was young. The girls in the brothels were bought on a kind of downpayment and once the girls worked it off, they could go free. Often however parents would continue to take out new debts on their "working girls" keeping their daughters in perpetual servitude. Even if the girls did work off their debt, the word for prostitute in Cambodia is srey kouc, "broken woman", and broken things cannot be mended and nobody wants people to know they have a prostitute in their family. The girl can never return home. Prostitution is their lot for life.

Somaly was often beaten by the customers, beaten by the owner's husband and the guards, put into the punishment room and while tied covered with snakes and left overnight. Cuts and welts were common things. But what Somaly suffered in prostitution and what young girls suffer now is vastly different. Now, girls have nails driven into their heads, girls are beaten with chains and electric cables, and girls are violenced in ways supposedly inconceivable but in ways which are influenced by the popular Chinese films full of torture scenes, movies favored by pimps nowadays.

Nowadays also the girl are taken at much earlier ages because in Cambodia men will pay thousands of dollars to rape a virgin for a week. Always a virgin because sex with a virgin is supposed to give a man strength, to lengthen a man's life span and even lighten his skin. Brothels, to ensure bona fide virgins, even sell girls as young as five and six years old. But after the first week is over, they sew the girl inside (without anesthetic) and quickly sell her again. A virgin is supposed to scream and bleed, and this way the girl will scream and bleed. They do this maybe three or four times. Another reason the virgin market in prostitution has taken off is that people believe that sex with a virgin will protect against illness, or even be a cure for AIDS. The little girls tear much more easily than women, likewise they get AIDS more easily too, but men are to be served; girls are to be obedient and subservient in all things.

After a time, Somaly paid off her debt and, because she didn't know anything else, she continued servicing men as a prostitute. However, she began servicing foreign expats, and eventually married one and moved to Paris. The year in Paris was difficult for both her husband and herself, and after a year they returned to Cambodia, but Somaly returned as a Cambodian married to a foreigner, who had foreign living experiences, was viewed as having improved herself, and indeed she had. She returned matured and having a new sense of confidence, and her heart bled for the girls trapped like she had been in prostitution, and so she began encouraging girls to leave, finding places where they could be trained as seamstresses for $100/mth, and finding medical aid for the girls who were sick and unable to get treatment. Her husband Pierre never complained about the expenses she incurred with her rescue attempts and eventually they opened a tiny home for prostitutes to run to and get shelter. Until that time her home was opened to these girls.

Near her home was a center for brothels called the "Broken Coconut", and "coconut" in Khmer is another word for a woman's secret place. Because of her home's position, she was easily able to help fleeing and desperate girls, but she was also an easy target for the growing power of the prosittution rings, which was quietly supported by many policemen. There were some big-hearted policemen but they were hard to find, and her home was stormed one night, making her flee for her life.

Early in 1996 Somaly and Pierre started a charity to fund a proper center to help prostitutes. They chose the name AFESIP which translates from French as Acting for Women in Distressing Situations, a name that carried no label of prostitution. Getting recognized was a struggle but in August 1996, a big conference on the sexual exploitation of children took place in Sweden, and several journalists wrote about Cambodia. After that, large international agencies seemed more interested in AFESIP and a big UN agency promised funds.

Over time, Somaly expanded the center in size and in skills taught. Her "mother" had joined her as a type of housemother to the prostitutes to love them and nurse them and teach them skills before finding them suitable jobs so more girls could be taken in. While her mother stayed at the center, Somaly could expand her work and she approached the Ministry of Defense and made it clear that the country needed sex education and girls needed to be given something beyond shame and ignorance of their bodies. She explained why it was important to discuss rape, and respect of women, the true circumstances of AIDS, and how it is most easily contracted, and therefore the need for the use of condoms. Since AIDS was epidemic, her proposal was accepted and she began sex education lectures in police stations, military camps and other places.

Over the years (book written in 2008) AFESIP has helped more than 5,000 victims of prostitution to get back on their feet. In Thailand, Laos and Vietnam AFESIP has helped an additional 1,000 victims. But reintegration is a long process. Some girls can be self-sufficient after only 10 months, but others that have been gravely psychologically damaged take months to build up trust and confidence before they can even be taught a skill, and it takes 1 1/2 years to train a woman to take the test for the government's hairdressing certificate. Therefore, AFESIP needs on-going donations, government support, government delegation, police protection, and volunteers to help these girls become confident, self-sufficient women. The prostitution business is worth $500 million/yr, almost as much as the annual budget for the government, so there is much resistance against AFESIP and Somaly herself.

Somaly says that even this many years away from being a prostitute and being repetitively raped day after day, she still suffers. After 15 years she still feels dirty. So she washes like a madwoman, puts cream on and covers herself in eau de toilette to mask the stench that pursues her. At home she has a cupboard full of perfume. She spends money to blot out a smell that only exists in her imagination. And she seeks to purge the stench of prostitution by her undying efforts in saving as many as she can. She is seeking to change the misguided thinking placed in the saying "Don't try to bend the sroleuw tree, don't try to change a whore" based on the belief that all whores are deceitful and dishonest, hard and intractable, when in fact they are often honest girls from the countryside, who have suffered and cannot express their suffering and anger and people interpret their anger and suffering emotions incorrectly. She seeks change.

Somaly has visited many countries as a speaker and advocate for the women of Cambodia, and worldwide, trapped in the machinations of prostitution. In Sweden she was awarded the World Children's Prize for the Rights of the Child. In Germany AFESIP was awarded he Roland Berger Award for Human Dignity. In Washington D.C. she was honored at the Vital Voices 2009 Global Leadership Awards, but no matter the awards and distinctions for her human rights work, dignity lost is hard to recapture. Somaly still works to regain her dignity and the dignity of those she represents.

The Ravens: Pilots on the Secret War of Laos

Christopher Robbins (2000) researched the Ravens, the little known group of flyers in the US Air Force. The group were the elites in a way but also the rogues, the men who flew well but wanted no constraints; they wanted their freedom in the skies to outperform or challenge the elements behind engines with wings; they wanted a chance to make a difference in a war that was bogged down in paperwork, men with too much leisure behind the lines and overwhelmed by bureaucracy. And so from a wild group of fliers known as the Butterflies, the Ravens were born, and Robbins whispers their story in The Ravens: Pilots of the Secret War of Laos.

The Ravens got their name from the raven bird, which is a bird of the gods. The exact reason for choosing this symbol for intelligence gathering is not clear yet the birds have figured heavily in many mythologies. In Nordic mythology, two ravens, Huyin (Thought) and Munin (Meaning), perch on the shoulders of Odin, the lord of gods, to whisper in their master's ears the things they have seen while flying to the ends of the earth. Similarly, the Vikings believed that the circling of the great black birds in the sky during battle were the representations of the gods in guise. To many American Indian tribes the raven could will to do anything as it was a source of power; it had created the sun, earth, moon, stars and people of the earth. Indians have admired the bird for its sagacity, recognizing its ruthless opportunism and wily trickery at the same time. Other beliefs about the raven have figured it to be a ominous bird and a harbinger of death. Zoologically it is known to be extremely clever and brave, having high mental development and the ability to convey messages to its fellows. For whatever reason the name was bestowed on the men who flew the hazards of Laos air in secrecy and in daily flights of death, either dropping bombs or napalm or other deathly things, or, dropping out of the skies to their own deaths. Their apt name intermixes mythology with the reality of their death watch in their daily flights to win territory for their allies, principally the Mao (Hmong).

Source with more mythology on the raven

Laos was not part of the war zone for the US or for the communists in North Vietnam, and both groups denied having troops in the off-limit zone ... and yet it was a zone so heavily bombed that eventually press leaks made the Americans aware of "another war theater", and caused more anger and anti-war sentiment during the Vietnam War, seemingly incorrectly named based on the widening theaters of bomb droppings.

"In excess of 6,300,000 tons of bombs rained down on Indochina during the Vietnam War years, more than all the explosives dropped in both the European and Pacific theaters in World War II. Less than a tenth (about 600,000 tons) of the total tonnage dropped in SE Asia fell on North Vietnam" despite that location being enemy headquarters. "The bombing of North Vietnam was mostly concentrated around the area directly above the 17th parallel, where troops and supplies were massed to move south. It is one of the supreme ironies of the war that it was South Vietnam, the allied country being defended, that bore the brunt of the US bombing--a staggering 3,900,000 tons. Laos took second place. More than 1,100,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, with a further 500,000 tons in Northern Laos (which means that a considerably greater tonnage was dropped on Laos than on Germany--which was devastated by 1,360,000 tons in World War II). The 1,600,000 tons of bombs dropped on Laos would have amounted to seventeen tons every square mile--or was equal to six-tenths of a ton of bombs for every man, woman and child."

Caught in the middle of all these bombs dropping, invasion of land, and fighting were the Mao (Hmong). Mao was a derogatory term commonly used for the Hmong until the 1970s when Dr. Yang Dao, the first of his people to earn a PhD, raised awareness that it was in fact a venomous word stemming from Chinese slander. Mao originates from the Chinese miao, meaning "barbarian". And yet the Mao (Hmong) were formidable fighters and fierce opponents; they did not deny the 'complementary' name but returned the complement by calling the Chinese "sons of dogs".

The Hmong were great warriors. They were a Mongolian race originating from China. They were the most mysterious of the 12 principal races of Indochina, and even more so since they had no written language or reliable history. Their histories were enshrouded in storytelling and legend, e.g. they had come out of China on a flying carpet, they originated in a land of eternal snow and arctic nights (Inuit origin?), they become werewolves and weretigers to eat the livers of slain enemies. They were a people who grew opium for medicine, but it was socially acceptable for only the old and infirm to use it. Their medical treatment were based on deep traditions for promoting health and long life, e.g. deer horn in velvet, tiger bone marrow, gall of bear and python, and skin of gaur (wild buffalo). And when the Ravens encountered them and introduced Band Aids to them, the Band Aids took on great reverence as medicine with magical powers which drew out bad phi (energy and/or spirits of their animist world).

The Ravens loved the Hmong and found them hard-working, determined, fearless and loving. When the US signed the Paris Agreement on Vietnam on January 12, 1973, South Vietnam and Cambodia (two countries intimately connected to the treaty and which quickly becames victims of the treaty) were not included in the negotiations. Laos, of course not being acknowledged by the US govt as part of the war, was not present or represented either. Basically the treaty called for a cease-fire but a clear date was unestablished ... and through the "treaty" the US was exonerated from the war, the Ravens were ordered to not drop any more bombs though their dear friends and allies (the Hmong) were being decimated below them in battle and pleading for bomb coverage. The Ravens heartbrokenly returned to the US, where they were hated as symbols of the Vietnam War. They felt their years of battling for the mountain territory of the Hmong among the highlands and the huge plateau of the Field of Jars (named after the 4000 ton jars mysteriously lying on the plateau and which were so heavy a helicopter could not airlift one out) was futile and wasted. Nothing had been gained ... and now everything was being lost by the Hmong.

In terror many Hmong, though drastically decimated in numbers, fled Laos to Thailand where they stayed in refugee camps hoping for patriation to other countries. Eventually 2,000 were scattered in Canada, Australia, Argentina and French Guyana. 6,000 in France. Over 50,000 in the US. This mountain group of people have not assimilated easily in the US where they predominantly were sent to cities to reside. Many brought crossbows, hoes and shaman paraphanalia. They had no language skill or technical skill for coping in a city life. They lived off welfare but had no idea of how to shop, cook or "live" the American way. Their family groups had functioned around clans but with clan dispersal among many nations, depression rates soar. While the American medical system is quick to label the Hmong as dysfunctional, the Hmong are more tolerant of "mental" illness. As animists believing that everything in the world must be in harmony, their dreams tell them they are out of harmony. They have rituals to propitiate spirits, but there are too many alien spirits in the US. Some strange deaths have occurred among the Hmong community, death by nightmare, which the Philippinos have a word for "bangungot", but which Americans shake their head at unaware that in a simpler age people would recognize that the Hmong are dying of broken hearts.