An occasional roundup of news stories about the issues impacting kids in Vietnam and around the world. This month, slavery has received significant media attention. – Babies are advertised for sale online in China…- … and a film maker ref…

“Hong” grew up in a small town on a high mountain in north-west Vietnam. She had never travelled far from home until the day one of her friends – a woman who lived just down the road – told her about a high-paying job as a mushroom farmer in China. Hon…

Just a month ago, I wrote about my own sense of despair in some of the situations that Blue Dragon faces with street kids in Vietnam: in particular, the aggressive pedophile rings that are targeting homeless boys in the cities. The last couple of …

7 year old “Thi” has had a terrifying 2 weeks. Thi is a H’mong girl from Dien Bien province; her home is a tiny village, nearby the one pictured below, way off the beaten track in the mountains close to China. A village in the commune from which Thi wa…

Usually when we talk about Vietnamese kids being trafficked to China, we’re talking about girls and young women who have been taken by deception and sold to brothels or into forced marriages. But today we dealt with a totally new situation that we have…

Lots of great news from Blue Dragon this week.  Followers on Facebook will know that we had 2 separate breakthroughs in the fight against human trafficking. A tip-off from a community member in Dien Bien province – a remote area in north-west…

Following a fairly quiet week at Blue Dragon, we’ve had an eventful weekend.

Since Friday evening, we’ve been inundated with problems: a gang of pimps twice attacking kids from our shelters, an Asian sex tourist ring targeting underage boys we know, and on and on. So much so that I’m looking forward to Monday morning to put the weekend’s headaches behind us!

An occasional roundup of news stories about the issues impacting kids in Vietnam and around the world.- The UK continues to struggle with the issue of Vietnamese children being trafficked in to the country to work in cannabis factories.- Moving on from…

The Year of the Goat has begun; and I for one am glad that the Year of the Horse is behind us. At the start of 2014, I quietly decided that it was to be the Year of Winning. Readers of this blog will know that in the past couple of years Blue Dragon ha…

It’s time for a change.For over 12 years now, I have been running Blue Dragon in Vietnam. I’ve never been alone in this: the struggles, joys and challenges have always been shared among a team. That team has grown over the years, as has the scope and i…

The Blue Dragon kids celebrated a terrific milestone last week: the 10th annual Tet Awards.Every year, for the last 10 years, we’ve held a ceremony to mark the end of the lunar calendar, and welcome the coming year. The original idea was to give each c…

It’s wedding season in Vietnam; the moon and custom dictates that this is a good time of year to marry, and so throughout the land couples are getting hitched everywhere you turn.Blue Dragon has not been immune to the buzz. Two of our ‘old boys’ have m…

The first in an occasional roundup of news stories about the issues impacting kids in Vietnam and around the world- Central Vietnam is being targeted by human traffickers- Vietnamese police arrest two men for selling child abuse images online (Vietname…

My stories on this blog and on the Blue Dragon Facebook are often about the journeys taken by Vietnamese youth, particularly trafficked children returning home and runaway boys being reunited with families.Indeed, last week saw the Blue Dragon team bri…

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…