children

As a girl she was sold into sexual slavery, but now she rescues others.

The story of a Cambodian heroine. Born in a village deep in the Cambodian forest, Somaly Mam was sold into sexual slavery by her grandfather when she was twelve years old. For the next decade she was shuttled through the brothels that make up the sprawling sex trade of Southeast Asia. Trapped in this dangerous and desperate world, she suffered the brutality and horrors of human trafficking—rape, torture, deprivation—until she managed to escape with the help of a French aid worker.

This extraordinary book contains eyewitness accounts of life in Cambodia during Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979, accounts written by survivors who were children at the time. The book has been put together by Dith Pran, whose own experiences in Cambodia were so graphically portrayed in the film The Killing Fields. The testimonies related here bear poignant witness to the slaughter the Khmer Rouge inflicted on the Cambodian people.

A chance meeting in an exotic land on the other side of the globe. A local guide trying to raise money to build a drinking well in his poor village. Hundreds of Cambodian school children who didn’t have a school to attend, or sometimes enough food, clean water, or medical care.

What unfolded next is truly amazing.

For over a century French officials in Indochina systematically uprooted metis children-those born of Southeast Asian mothers and white, African, or Indian fathers-from their homes. In many cases, and for a wide range of reasons-death, divorce, the end of a romance, a return to France, or because the birth was the result of rape-the father had left the child in the mother's care.