The debt of gratitude owed to parents is a strongly held concept across the Mekong area. For women in very poor families, that leaves little option. But I have no income. Our field produces nothing. I have three younger sisters, two brothers and a mother who has tuberculosis.
Nobody can work.
He told me he had AIDS and that if I were a virgin, he would be cured. Now I have tested positive, but I don't care. Decades of civil strife in Myanmar and Cambodia have swelled the river of people criss-crossing the borders. Some are migrants seeking a better life, others refugees from conflict. Then there are the women and girls sold into marriage, prostitution or as modern-day slave labor.