I was sitting in my hotel room answering emails, when I got an SMS from a kid I had met the night before and had already arranged to meet up with in about two hour’s time. The SMS translated into “come quick, rescue me”. I immediately went and knocked on the door of the other rescue agent’s room and we got dressed and headed to the brothel.

A brief background on this girl: we had met her and her friend the night before, both girls were 17 years old and were from the same hometown, maybe eight hours from the bar. They were from poor families and the parents had sent them to work in a bar to make them big money, and the girls felt a lot of pressure to deliver. They had only been in the bar for about a week and it seemed by the way they spoke and their body language that they had yet to be made to have sex with a customer.
 
As we arrived in the brothel we looked around and couldn’t find the girl who sent the SMS to me. I asked the mamasan where she was and she said the girl hadn’t come into work yet, which is what they often say when a girl had already been taken by a customer.

Unfortunately, it was true. This kid had been taken to the customer’s hotel, made to participate in sex, and then sent her on her way. When she came back to the brothel she was visibly shaken and not the same girl I had met the night before.

The experience changed the way she saw herself. Despite our offer of freedom, she surrendered to her parents’ demands for money and chose to sacrifice her body to support them.

It is moments like these that break my heart. My soul cries and I struggle to pick myself up again, but the hope is always in the next kid, maybe, just maybe we can rescue the next one we find.