VietACT's 2006 Human Rights Night was a great success! I'm exhausted and I need to get sleep before our board of directors meeting tomorrow so I will keep this short (or as brief as possible, we all know that I'm super wordy).

I've been making several appearances on Vietnamese television and radio and a few questions keep on coming up. Especially, 1. what stories have you heard from the victims/survivors in Taiwan have changed you? and 2. now that you're back home in Orange County, CA, how do you see yourself still helping those victims/survivors? Sometimes I feel that I'm not yet fully prepared to talk about the stories and particular persons who truly touched my heart and made me question my own existence, question the world we live in, the politics involved, and basically the human emotions that drive people to do bad, that drive people to do desperate things, and more importantly, what drives people to do good. Some of the emotions and stories I heard and came across this past summer are still fresh, are still very intense, and I am still digesting and taking my time to try to find a way to recount the stories of my Vietnamese sisters and brothers in Taiwan in a way that does them justice. For now, all I can say is that I was truly inspired by their courage. This leads to the second question: what now? And ladies and gentlemen, Human Rights Night was the perfect answer.

100+ citizens from our community braved cold weather (and even rain!) to join VietACT for Human Rights Night. We managed to teleconference with dissidents in Viet Nam and their testimonies, their hopes, their message to our community moved me to tears. We had support from the young, the twenty-something year olds, politicians, the wise elders of our community (and even a few canine guests!) The week before I left Taiwan, I spent a majority of the nights crying in bed. I didn't know how to say good-bye to the friends I had made, to the family of survivors who adopted me and fed me and taught me Vietnamese. I also didn't know what could be done for their sake, to bring them justice, to vindicate the suffering they have gone through. Tonight, I felt like I was part of something that was doing something for the human trafficking survivors, I felt a strong sense of justice and a strong sense solidarity and pride. I almost cried several times tonight. But these tears were different from the ones I cried in Taiwan. When you see a dream of yours come true, when you realize that you are making the dreams of those less fortunate come true, when you realize that you are part of something meaningful, you can't help but cry.

Before I left Taiwan, several of the survivors came to me and told me, "I don't think we will ever see each other again but I want you to know that you've touched my heart." Tonight, as I looked out to the crowd of those gathered at Human Rights Night, I saw the faces of my Vietnamese brothers and sisters and it touched my heart. We are all courageous, those who survived trafficking, those who survived war, those who survived adversary, those who have overcome fear.

Be not afraid, be the change. Do not hesitate to be something great in our community and something great for our community.