It’s been a month since I have been active on my blog. Time to admit that I have been very slack!There’s been a lot happening here in Vietnam over Christmas and new year, with rescues and police operations as well as the less visible but equally import…

Nga was glad to start life over. Her husband had been a violent alcoholic, and she knew that leaving him behind and taking their young children away to live with her mother was the only way to keep them safe.Being a single mother in rural Vietnam is ne…

The Blue Dragon Rescue team has had an extraordinary day.For 2 months, we have been hearing rumours of ethnic minority children being trafficked to an illegal gold mine in a mountainous part of Vietnam. The police have been investigating, but informati…

Monday was a day of great hope coupled with great uncertainty. I wrote on Monday evening about the challenges being faced by 3 kids here at Blue Dragon:- a 13 year old girl, “Huong,” who has been rescued from a forced marriage in China but whose mother…

I was riding a bicycle across Hanoi’s famous Long Bien bridge when the boy, “Hieu,” appeared from underneath the railway lines.Long Bien is a city icon, and serves as the rail bridge across the Red River. It’s also home to countless homeless children -…

This photo was taken in China on Friday by a member of the Blue Dragon Rescue team.  The girls are Vietnamese teens who were trafficked at different times and by different gangs for sale to the Chinese sex trade. One girl, aged 16, was sold to a b…

When Blue Dragon’s rescue team receives a call for help, we start an investigation immediately.Investigations sometimes take just a matter of hours or days. And sometimes, they take months.On Thursday, one of our longest running investigations came to …

A few months ago, I had never heard the name ‘Hardwell.’I had no idea that he was the world’s Number 1 DJ, and I hadn’t even heard of electro house music.And yet, on Sunday last week, I joined a crowd of 13,000 – mostly young Vietnamese – to pack out a…

The sex trafficking and sexual assault of boys in Vietnam are issues that have been snowballing over the past 2 years. Blue Dragon has been coming across new cases every week; some weeks, we meet 3 or 4 boys who have been abused. Their stories are pain…

Could it be true?Could we really have such a fairytale ending?In late 2005, Blue Dragon met a 13 year old boy selling flowers on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. That boy, Ngoc, had been trafficked by gang of women who forced him to work through the ni…

In recent months I have been writing about the incredible dangers that Hanoi’s street kids face: in particular, the danger of being trafficked and sexually exploited.So far this week, Blue Dragon’s Street Outreach team has met 3 new homeless boys. Two …

“Bin” and “Thay” are teen girls, not quite 15 years old; and yet already have been through a hell most of us will never know.Each was taken separately. Although they are both from Ha Giang province in northern Vietnam, they didn’t know each other befor…

In the past month, Blue Dragon’s Legal Advocacy team has represented two children in court. Although they were both cases of sexual abuse, they were completely separate matters.The first case went to court in July. A 44 year old man, Lan, was sentenced…

Vinh* is 14 years old. He is homeless, sleeping in one of Hanoi’s many supposedly-outlawed 24 hour internet cafes. He plays computer games all day, and when he runs out of money he contacts a pimp who calls himself “Aunty” and makes money from traff…

When Blue Dragon was just beginning, our focus was on getting street kids and homeless children into safe homes and schools. And while that’s still a large part of what we do, along the way something else has happened: those kids have grown up and many…