With no money or familial support after a painful divorce, Sanda* was forced into sex trafficking in a karaoke bar in Southeast Asia, where customers verbally and sexually abused Sanda and the other women.

“If they wanted to touch us, we would have to let them do whatever they wanted,” she remembers. “We were the ‘entertainment’ for the customers, and would have to give them pleasure in any way we could. The hardest thing for me was to try and seduce the customers, because I knew many of them had wives and children.” 

This trauma was Sanda’s reality for one month. But everything changed one day when an Atlas Free’s Network Member came into the bar.

Someone on the team gave Sanda a card with a phone number on it. And after a lifetime of having no one she could turn to for help—not her parents, not her family, not her husband—the number on this little card was a lifeline for Sanda. She remembers calling them from the bar, sobbing to the voice on the other end, “I want to be free.” 

The team invited Sanda to an awareness party at their drop-in center, and there, she finally found a community that cared. “For the first time, I felt like I had someone in my life who I could talk to,” she recalls. When one of the staff offered her a job as a team leader starting at 9 am the next day, she could hardly believe it, as finding a job as a 36-year-old isn’t easy in this area, where even factories don’t hire anyone over age 30.

Now, thanks to her excellent communication skills, Sanda is thriving in her position as leader on the outreach team, where she leads her team into the community to distribute the microgreens they produce and explain their nutritional benefits. Malnutrition is a huge issue in this area, and it contributes to the vulnerability to trafficking. Sanda and the team share the microgreens they grow and produce with people in the community to reduce malnutrition. Sanda loves getting to teach young people on her team, and feels proud to put on her uniform in the morning. Her thriving life is now worlds away from the sex trafficking in that karaoke bar. 

“I’m so grateful and proud to be working here,” says Sanda. “And I really wish that everyone who was in my situation could get the same chance and opportunity as me.” 

You can support women like Sanda by giving today.

*Name changed to protect the identity of the survivor.