Somaly Mam tells about how she gradually lost all her heart and soul as an abandoned child and sex slave. Slowly, through the help of barang, “foreign” men, she began to gain her heart. This rebirth of her heart began through her compassion toward other sufferers like herself and through her contact with other foreign men who perhaps used her but who were not as bad as the men she knew as a child when she was working off her grandfather's debts. Through contacts at Doctors without Frontier, she stumbled into her life's work: preserving women from prostitution and rehabilitating them.
In the end, I came from this book with two strong opinions. The first was truly a painful one, but it’s a truth I have always somewhat known. I suppose I only had to be reminded of it again. It is this: that humans need to be spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically trained to love their neighbors — and even their children — as themselves. When one reads of women selling their own daughters into sex-slavery or fathers raping their own daughters to “hurt their mother” (because “the woman carried the child, not me”) one has to shake one’s head. Perhaps living in the United States where the US media continue to train its viewers how to live in the shoe of the other — other races, other sexes, other religions, and even others in our family — has contributed to the opening of the human mind.
The second truth is that humans can be emotionally healed of anything and after they are healed, they can help to heal others. Somaly Mam became a great hero and is the cofounder and preident of AFESIP (Acting for Women in Distressing Situations) in Cambodia. Under her inspiration and leadership, she has saved, rehabilitated, and restored many former victims of secual slavery in Southeast Asia.
We get a glimpse of the history of Cambodia, of course. But that isn’t what is important. We in the west are too used to studying war as the strategies of good men versus evil men. That may or may not be true, but here is a war from the point of view of those indirectly involved – non-combatants in a war-torn country where the old evil mixes with the new evil. And aside from the specifics of a particular war, we see the ongoing eternal war in which the powerful oppress the weak.
Highly recommended.
Article comments
1 - Jennifer @ Quiverfull Family
Sounds like a difficult, important book to read. The Lord has been placing a burden on my heart for women in bondage in these circumstances, though I'm not sure why. You might also enjoy reading Escaping the Devil's Bedroom by Dawn Herzog Jewell.
2 - Carole McDonnell
Hi Jennifer:
Yes, it was a tough book. I like tough books. Don't know why. I guess they serve to remind me about the state of the world. -C