As Human Trafficking Day (Thursday, Jan. 11) highlights a global crisis that often seems overwhelming, a small Maine-based nonprofit is pointing the way toward lasting solutions. Friends of Thai Daughters (FTD) operates two safe houses in Northern Thailand. For 13 years, the family-scale organization has been transforming the lives of at-risk girls and young women and even eliminating trafficking in many of their home villages. Unlike many non-profits in developing countries that provide basic needs to large numbers of potential victims, FTD creates “families” for children who have no family. Interventions are intensive, wide-ranging and long-term. That approach has proven successful beyond expectations in saving girls and young women from lives of poverty, forced prostitution and despair. In fact, some of FTD’s greatest success stories are emerging as future leaders of Northern Thailand including high school senior Lutha Chermur who was recently named one of the top 10 students in Northern Thailand. Chermur aspires to be a medical doctor.

The small scale of the program, which supports 40 girls and young women annually, builds trust. Villagers know that when an at-risk girl comes under the care of FTD, her prospects improve dramatically almost overnight. Consequently, these villagers become FTD’s allies in the fight against traffickers.

Twenty-seven year-old Suparat “Khai” Kongsi, lives in Washington, D.C. and was one of FTD’s first “Daughters” and founding inspirations. Two Maine women, Patty Zinkowski and Jane McBride, came across her in a tiny Thai village near the Laos border in 2002. At that time, Zinkowski and McBride had tired of their corporate jobs and were on a soul-searching trip to Southeast Asia. Something inside them clicked when they saw a dilapidated structure housing 11 year-old Khai and a handful of kids receiving minimal support from a Thai-based non-profit but otherwise fending for themselves. Rather than continue with their travel itinerary, the pair decided to stick around and do something. The result was Friends of Thai Daughters, formally chartered in 2005.

Khai’s story speaks to the needless suffering and wasted human potential wrought by those who trade in human beings. Throughout her childhood, Khai had a fear many children do not. She feared she would be sold into slavery as a sex worker or laborer. She lived in poverty with her widowed mother, a prostitute. Khai feared the men who paid for her mother might take her and sell her. Khai was eight when her mother died of AIDS in a jail cell in Northern Thailand.

Zinkowski and McBride, through their new organization, provided her an opportunity to live within a functioning family in a Sunflower House, FTD’s first safe house. She lived with a Thai mentor and a handful of girls like her -- her new FTD “sisters.” With FTD she attended school, received emotional support and was offered the opportunity to pursue college if she showed the initiative and fortitude. She did. She now holds a bachelor’s degree in Thai Literature from Thailand’s Chiang Mai University and is an entrepreneur and language teacher. She mentors her younger FTD “sisters” along with children in her home town of Chiang Khong through social media and visits back home. She is also an FTD spokesperson sharing her story. Today, she lives with her husband, Oliver Crocco, an American doctoral student, who was studying in Thailand when they met. They plan to return to Thailand when he completes his degree at George Washington University.

National Human Trafficking Day has special significance for Khai. She was almost a statistic, joining the over 48.5 million people enslaved worldwide as part of the $150 billion human trafficking industry. It is estimated that over 400,000 are enslaved in her native Thailand. The economic incentives for trafficking are powerful and complex. During the height of U.S. slavery, a slave cost upwards of $40,000 in current dollars. Today, people are bought and sold for as little as $30. Friends of Thai Daughters cannot eradicate this outrage on a global scale. But its founders, supporters and volunteers believe they have an important lesson to share: big successes on a small-scale matter -- and they can be repeated by others. 

To report suspected abuses, the Human Trafficking Hotline is 1-888-373-7888.