Zen and the art of charity work

Blue Dragon has rescued dozens of people from slavery in recent weeks. But knowing that thousands more need our help, how can we find strength to keep going?

In the heart of Myanmar’s war zone, 21 young men were held captive, forced to scam strangers online. Blue Dragon sent a team to rescue them. Last week, they arrived home.

Then we worked with authorities from both Vietnam and Laos to rescue 13 women, most aged 18 to 25, from brothels in the Golden Triangle. With the arrest of 5 traffickers and the closure of several of these terrible brothels, a whole trafficking ring has now been wiped out.

These are significant achievements. And yet, we know that there’s vastly more to do.

There are still tens of thousands of people awaiting rescue; and hundreds of thousands at risk of being trafficked if they are not given the protection they need.

So as an NGO, how does Blue Dragon reconcile this gap between celebrating our achievements while acknowledging the crushing reality of what remains to be done?

Darkness and light

My way of dealing with this over the years has been to embrace the contradictions. To accept that light and dark can exist in the same time and space.

This means striving to make things better while also being at peace with what we cannot change for now.

The necessity of this mindset is especially important in our work with street kids.

Blue Dragon’s social workers are out on the streets every night, talking to kids who’ve experienced abuse, hunger and neglect. What we see and hear is often deeply traumatic.

Our instinct is to want to try to fix things. After all, that’s what we’re here for. We want to see development: kids back in school, parents starting jobs, families leaving the streets to live in safe homes.

But at the same time, we need to accept that this takes time. We can’t always achieve what we would like. And some situations will never change, no matter what do.

Rather than be disappointed, we need to see the value in simply caring.

NGOs like Blue Dragon are under constant pressure to get results. With their focus on development, they don’t typically place a lot of emphasis on “caring”. There are all sorts of reasons. It’s not sustainable or measurable or replicable.

It is, however, human to care. And Blue Dragon has found that we can do both. We can strive for development while accepting that sometimes all we can do is care.

I’m reminded of a grandmother we know, raising her extended family on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. “Lots of people and organisations come by to give us things or tell us what to do,” she once shared. “But you’re the only people who stop and talk with us.”

We’d love nothing more than to help this grandmother and her family off the street. In a flash, we would rent them a place to live and get them started in a business to earn money from home.

But they’re not ready for that – they don’t see the possibility. Maybe they don’t yet trust that we will really help them for the long term.

So all we can do is go by a couple of times a week, sit on the side of the road with them and share some hot tea.

And that’s OK.

Contribution

Being at peace with how things are doesn’t mean that we give up trying to change things.

Blue Dragon is still out there offering help to street kids. We’re still rescuing people from slavery and working village to village to prevent human trafficking from happening.

As we do this, we know that just by caring and trying, we’re already making a contribution. If “all” that we do is show a child that someone cares for them, that’s already an achievement.

Recently we reconnected with a young man named To who lived on the streets as a child. He was one of the most challenging kids we’ve ever worked with because he had never lived in a home or followed anybody else’s rules.

In many respects, To was best described as a ‘wild child’ and we always felt that we had failed to make much difference in his life. He never went back to school or settled into a home; he just kept on drifting about and getting into trouble.

When To came back to Blue Dragon earlier this year, after more than a decade of absence, he saw things very differently.

From his point of view, his time with us had been the best time of his childhood.

Our concern was always that we never achieved the change in his life that we believe he needed. However, his only concern was that we cared for him. That’s what he needed more than anything else.

Solving the world’s biggest problems requires strategy and resources put to work over a long time.

But we don’t have to wait forever to have an impact. We can do so in each moment. Because the here and now matters just as much as tomorrow.

This is the final Life Is A Long Story for 2024. I’ll be back in January with more stories from the kids of Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation.