A post popped up in my Facebook feed recently with a face that I instantly recognised. I haven’t seen ‘Tam’ since his graduation from vocational training about 5 years ago, but of course he doesn’t look a day older. Tam was 14 when I met him. He was one of the first children that Blue Dragon rescued from the sweatshops in southern Vietnam. A country boy, he and some of his village friends were persuaded that dropping out of school and going to “learn to be a tailor” was the…

Boi is a pretty cool dude. He’s wearing his hair long today, but every other time you see him he has a new style. He’s grown quite tall in the past 2 years and walks with a confident, sometimes cocky, stride. He’s no longer the skinny little kid we met 5 years ago, homeless on the streets of Hanoi and so deeply drawn into himself. Back then, Hanoi was a different city and Boi was a different person. He had come to the city to escape an abusive family, and…

My is back in school now. She’s studying in Grade 11 high up in the mountains of north-west Vietnam, living in a boarding house because the journey from her home to school is too far to travel each day. Seeing her with her classmates, she looks like any senior student and has all the same worries and burdens of any teenage school girl. But My has also been through an experience few of us can fully understand. In February 2017, at age 15, she was trafficked and sold as a…