There are moments, after traveling so much, that everything begins to look the same. Cities all look the same. Villages all look the same. Food starts to seem the same. The buildings become redundant. The landscape resembles somewhere else. All the rich tastes begin to blend together. You start to feel like you’re taking the same pictures you took a month ago in a totally different place. And in that sometimes overwhelming feeling of sameness, I find myself arrogantly believing I’ve seen it all. Yet, each place continues to surprise me in both good ways and bad…

Southeast Asia has captivated my heart as well as broken it into a thousand pieces. I’ll write about the captivating part later… for now, the broken part…

I have seen so much here. Homeless lining the streets. Beggars too old or sick to do anything much more than beg to live upon the mercy of others. People with injuries or deformities so abnormal that they hide their faces in shame as they pass. Shoeless, naked children running about the city trying to sell their sometimes stolen products. Some surrounding, following, pulling at the skirts of tourists at sites like Angkor Wat using their sad, dirty faces and simple english to try and sell things to make money for food, or school, or whoever is forcing them to work. Old men creepily enjoying some sort of erotic lower stomach/pelvis massage in the middle of the street. People everywhere running scams. Western men who have come to prey like bloody vultures on the young, precious, innocent girls of these countries, most who haev been sold, stolen, or tricked into prostitution.

There’s two pictures I just can’t shake from my mind.

ONE
Driving up to the ancient temples of Angkor Wat, I immediately found myself surrounded by unschooled children trying to sell me stuff for ridiculously cheap prices. With no shoes, dirty faces, and longing eyes, they bombarded me before I even stepped out of our tuk-tuk. One small girl in particular looked up at me with big beautiful, yet sad, tired eyes. She pulled at my clothes as I stepped out of the tuk-tuk. “Lady, lady. Please buy. You need. 3 bracelet – only one dollar. You need. Very nice. Very nice bracelet lady. Buy please. Money give for school.” I said ‘no thanks’, but she was persistent. ‘Come on lady. Please buy. Very nice bracelet. See. All different kind.’ I bought a few things, but soon, as I walked away, I put on my sun glasses to hide the tears coming to my eyes. Thank God for sunglesses. The thing is – she wasn’t the only one. Each of us were surrounded by at least 5 children. Amazingly smart and adorable. All their english learned from tourists. We talked to a few older ones. They could even list capitals of countries of the world. They could speak phrases in English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese. Their hunger to learn could not be stopped, even without school.

I’m no expert, but I know that many of them are street kids trying to make money to eat and live. Some do go to school in the morning or afternoon and come to work when they’re not at school. But many don’t. Some are selling stolen goods. And others are working for organized begging/selling rings without a good way out. If you saw the movie Slumdog Millionaire, remember when the kids get sucked into working for that begging ring? And they want to take out the kids eye so he’ll make them more money? Remember? That is actually not at all far from the truth. It’s exactly the same idea. Though I thankfully didn’t see any kids with missing eyes, I would guess that at least some of these kids are in trapped in that same kind of getup. And essentially it’s a form of modern day slavery.

TWO
This next story, I really can’t get out of my head. Perhaps in part because I stared for so long due to my level of appallment and my helpless desire to change something. But it disturbs me that much. It starts with an old white man. And when I say ‘old’, I mean at leats 55. He sat there, rubbing his hands rather forcefully around a young local girl’s breasts while she lay uncomfortably between his lap and chest. He periodically removed one hand to take a hearty swig of beer. It seemed to offer a slight relief to the tense girl since it caused him to slow down with the one hand to a somewhat softer movement compared to his usual force of groping. But quickly, he would go back to roughly violating the innocent girl with all of his perverted desire in both of his hands. Sometimes, he’d stick one down her shirt to get a less hindered grasp. Occassionally, he bent down to jolt his tongue around in her mouth. She followed dutifully as he squeezed her lips with his mouth, but there was nothing in her eyes that says she wants it. Her eyes were sort of empty. His… the only thing in his eyes was a crazed, animal-like look. A look that screams nothing other than ‘sex,sex,sex,sex,sex,sex’.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forget the looks on their faces, in their eyes. Especially not the girl’s. Laying there evidently uncomfortably, yet dutifully. She seemed to have accepted his barbarianism – this conditional, momentary, physical ‘love’ (if you have the audacity to call it that) as how life goes. You know the phrase, ‘It’s not love, it’s lust’? Well… this wasn’t even lust. It was pure perversion. I could see the pain of being used by the man like a piece of disposable tissue and being devoured like meat lining her glazed-over eyes as she stared sort of apathetically into the distance. Her eyes not on him. Not on herself. Not on others. Just… the distance. Perhaps trying to escape to her own world until this too had passed…

After not too long, he brought her to a dark room close by… And I don’t need to continue… we all know he continued to violate her more and more…until he had satisfied himself and himself only. With complete disregard to the girl, or her wellbeing, or the fact that she’s a person with a soul, not a sex toy.

I wondered if the renting of her body to this perv had been paid for that night. Whether negotiated by her own business to gain some money to live, or by the force of her ’employers’. Or, had she simply found herself food to another hungry man, hoping that maybe this time, his ‘love’ would last longer than the evening, perhaps providing her with a better life?

Regardless, it broke my heart. This is the land where Western perverts come to find cheap sexy things to bang. Actually, you can pick out some of these out of the crowd pretty easily. It’s the ones sitting alone, who’s eyes and minds are beholding one thing. Their eyes radiate sexual lust for anything that moves. And long as they keep coming, the demand for young girls will not diminish.

It makes me literally sick to my stomach. And I have seen people that I literally want to punch. More than that really. Like the old man with the girl. Excuse me for saying, but I would have loved nothing more in that moment that to have cut off that perv’s genitals. Moreso, I wish that I had the power to rescue her from it all…

I’m not naive. Well, maybe sometimes I can be. But in this regard, I don’t consider myself naive. I’ve seen a lot of the world, and I know these things exist. I know they are reality – more in some places than in others. And though they’re painful to hear, they don’t surprise me. Humanity reeks of depravity. But knowing is often very different from seeing. From hearing. From experiencing. Read all the books you want about the injustices in the world, but seeing, feeling it, will change something inside of you.

I’ll write about all the good and lovely things here soon – and trust me, there are PLENTY. But, I needed to share some of the realities of life here. And on a more encouraging note, there are a lot of cool people and organizations both here and afar working to change things. Wouldn’t it be great if we gave up a coffee or 2 each month and used the extra money to send a kid to school? Or if we gave up that extra ……. and gave a little of the money that you would have spent to an organization that is working to rescue and give hope to enslaved girls…