Sunday, March 6, 2016

About our trip to Hue to learn about the prevention of trafficking ~ Guest blog by CEF's Ms Kim Chi

We had a fantastic trip to Hue in order to have Anti-Trafficking Training. We started in the morning from Hoi An, so we had enough time to enjoy morning tea when we arrived in Hue. For me, it was amazing to have morning tea at the Peaceful Bamboo Family Cafe. After our tea and biscuits a kind man there took us around and talked to us all about the Peaceful Bamboo Family. There are many disadvantaged children and adolescents there and many are passionate about drawing or painting or doing lacquer painting. Some do training in cooking and make cookies and drinks for guests. All the drink and food were made by them with love. They also have a school and kindergarten as well as productive garden where they grow their own vegetables.

CEF at Peaceful Bamboo Family
  A vegetable bed at Peaceful Bamboo Family
Pagoda in Hue we visited

After having lunch at a vegetarian restaurant, and visiting a pagoda, we had the excellent training and presentation about the prevention of trafficking and child labor at Blue Dragon Children's Foundation. They were very informative and we learned a lot more than we knew. They are doing wonderful work to both prevent trafficking of children and to help those who have been trafficked to adjust and reintegrate.

CEF at Blue Dragon Children's Foundation in Hue
Part of the presentation we viewed

The prevention of trafficking of children is very important to us at CEF as we work with children who live in the mountains, in remote areas and near the Laos border. There it is quite easy for traffickers to come and seduce children and their families with money because the parents are frequently uneducated as well as very poor. We now know much more information to help identify the ways traffickers work, what we should do when we suspect or know of trafficking, and how to help the children in those circumstances by referring them to Blue Dragon for help and support.

Money is very important to poor families. Parents therefore often ask their children to quit school to go to work, or to help their relatives in big cities like Ha Noi or Ho Chi Minh. Although they are frequently very young and under 16 years old the parents don’t realize that this is very dangerous for them to do; the parents are just thinking about money. In poor communities they often don’t know that it’s illegal to let children work when they are under 16 years old. They also don’t know it is called ‘child labor’. Therefore, by understanding about child trafficking and child labor, we can explain to both parents and children, and therefore help to prevent our CEF children from quitting school and going to work.

In the future, we hope that we can organize workshops about Anti-Trafficking of children for parents and children to understand more about it.

Thanks Blue Dragon and thanks CEF’s Founding Director for supported us to have this useful training.


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