IMPACT

Too much time has gone by since I posted. Truthfully, when I arrived back on U.S. soil, I wrote a very long post that never got finished between my feverish applying for jobs and transient living style, aka somewhat being homeless. In many ways, my life has mirrored the survivors of trafficking. I understood more, as an unemployed American, the feeling of hopelessness, depression and desperation that my trafficked Vietnamese brothers and sisters face than I did as a volunteer at the shelter. As each month rolled by and I got no responses from this stale economy, I considered certain lines of work I would never have considered had I not been so desperate. While I didn't submit to engaging in any of them, I certainly see how easy it is to prey upon vulnerable people.

I don't come from a family where my parents or siblings will put money in my bank account even in emergency times. The only person who takes care of me is me. The day came where I didn't know how I was going to eat the next month. That's a scary debilitating feeling. It's a complete feeling of failure when you can't find a job to save your life, and you've put as much time and energy into school as I have. I did the only thing I could. I applied for food stamps. Imagine what it must feel like if you had a masters degree and a decently running car, but you're waiting in line between a mother with 3 crying children and a man in traditional Burmese attire with one leg (who clearly recently arrived to the states)...all because you're homeless and unemployed. As I stood in line for 4 hours, I questioned how my choices in life led me to the same place as everyone else in line. And not that I saw myself as better than those people, but just as someone with more opportunity to change my situation, yet unable to do so when my own government was doing nothing to create sustainable jobs. Every trafficked man and woman I talked to had said the same thing, there were no jobs in their country. After I received my emergency food stamp card, I sat by the perfectly cut grass outside the Health and Human Services building, reveling in the irony of similar circumstances between me and the survivors, yet now understanding the deep impact that our public assistance programs can make on the lives of truly needy individuals. People too easily condemn our government, but in 1975 when my family of refugees landed in Arkansas without food and then in 2010 when I was in need, the social service programs created back in Roosevelt's day allowed me (and my family) to survive. In Vietnam and many countries around the world, if you don't have money for food you starve. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

My caseworker was the kindest man who collected my information between little rivulets of tears running down my face. His kindness and my feeling of being swathed in failure created little unstoppable fountains in my eyes. I kept thinking how 3 months ago I had his job. I was helping others. This exacerbated the crying. Needless to say, he cheered me up and gave me hope to get through the day. He has a kind letter of thanks on it's way to him in the mail.

Things have started to look up in my life. The food stamps saw me through until I was able to find suitable work. When my own family member, knowing I was unemployed, turned me out on the street, a compassionate friend helped to house me in her living room. She and her family assisted me spiritually through their kindness and generosity. My days of driving in between San Diego and LA looking for work have ended. I have a good job counseling teens at a group home and last week, after months of not having a place to call home, I moved into my own place. It's a small room in a shared apartment, but hey, we all have to start somewhere. Never, at 26 (almost 27) did I see my life turning out this way. It's still a good life, just a little different than what I expected. Working with trafficked folks gave me the strength to get through a very dark time in my life -- the past 6 months. Everyday I look for things to celebrate, because life is a precious experience. The most impactful thing about Taiwan wasn't the big stuff like the trafficking stories of human degradation. It was the "little things" I learned about hope, kindness, and resilience that changed my life. Turns out those things aren't so little after all.

Please read on for an excerpt I wrote my friend after reading her thesis. Hope Pavich, an amazingly talented researcher and dedicated human rights advocate, worked side-by-side with me in Taiwan. Consider it an epilogue of sorts to my overseas experience:
Hope, as I continue to read this paper, I am brought back to our memories of TW in a different way. I actually cried about 5 pages in, because the weight of what we witnessed has had time to metabolize. When we were on the go, running from detention center to the shelter to grabbing boba in between a protest, it all flashed by so quickly. For 6 months that I’ve been back in the states, our experience has metastasized into a tumor in me of ugly truth about the world that I carry around, not bitterly but rather just fully aware, as I mull over my next opportunity to help fight slavery. Slavery in 2010. Maybe I let myself too easily be socialized to think of “slavery” as only a historically relevant term related to cotton picking and ancient times. History class has a way of depersonalizing the truth, eh? And yet, as I sit on my little futon and get ready to go to the gym, our little Taiwan seems surreal. How were we able to leave and go back to this – this life of normalcy – when even as I write there are millions of people, thousands of my own in fact, being treated like chattel. I find it amazing how people can so easily separate themselves from the ugly reality of those trafficked when our very lifestyle is fed by it. Well, my dear, I don’t know when I will as involved as we once were (for as long as we were!), but I am proud of everything we did. Especially, I am proud of your thesis, because you are helping to move this issue forward. Every action counts. I acknowledge every effort you made and continue to make, and I thank you for your kind and generous spirit that gives motivation, and inspiration to my life. I love you!