Dr. Sandie Morgan and Dave Stachowiak discuss the value of collaboration with Helen Sworn, founder of the Chab Dai organization in Cambodia. Helen has provided a replicable framework that emphasizes the need for partnership in order to end human trafficking.

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Transcript

Dave: [00:00:01] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 186, Building a Coalition and Building Capacity.

Production Credits: [00:00:10] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave: [00:00:30] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie: [00:00:35] And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave: [00:00:38] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, we often talk about the power of partnerships on the show and today a conversation with someone who is a tremendous leader in this way.

Sandie: [00:00:58] Well, I am so, excited to introduce my dear friend and colleague, Helen Sworn. She is the founder of Chab Dai and absolutely has been a model for me to follow how she does international programming, how she builds partnerships. And so, we’re just going to dive right in, Helen, and welcome you to the show.

Helen: [00:01:23] Thank you very much. It’s great to be on is Sandie, with you.

Sandie: [00:01:26] OK. And for those of you who just heard Helen for the first time, she’s located in the UK, but she has lived in Cambodia for many years as well. So, tell us about Chab Dai and kind of the meaning and the history.

Helen: [00:01:44] Sure, so, Chab Dai in the Cambodian language means “joining hands”. And that really underpins the entire ethos and foundation and practice of everything that we do as an organization whether we’re doing prevention work, whether we’re doing our legal work, whether we’re working within the coalition, whether we’re doing research or advocacy, joining hands is how we do it.

Sandie: [00:02:17] Tell me just a little bit about how you came to be in Cambodia.

Helen: [00:02:23] So, yes very long story cut very short. I had been working for a number of years in a very kind of cutthroat business world in the UK and my husband and I kind of came to faith and really had a sense that we wanted to move outside that comfort zone and go into some type of full-time Christian work. So, we thought well we’d better go and study about this. So, we took ourselves off to seminary for three years and it was while we were there that we really got a heart initially to work with street kids and homeless youth and really Southeast Asia opened up for us. We went there for an internship and then moved there at the beginning of 1999 with a small mission agency from the UK with our two children. Our daughter at the time was four and our son was six months old. So, yes, we were those crazy ones that I think our families were somewhat shocked at and the work that we were going to do. My husband went to set up a vocational training school in I.T. and I actually went with my kind of research and strategic planning background to help the organization do its strategy for the next couple of years and in the work that it was doing. So, that was what took us out there originally.

Sandie: [00:03:48] And then I think what kept you there was what started Chab Dai right?

Helen: [00:03:57] Yeah. What kept me there was a very strong vision that God gave me on a physical journey that I took from Phnom Penh up to the Thai Cambodia border later on in the year 1999. And we had seen a lot of street kids and families going missing and we couldn’t work out what was happening. We really didn’t have the language ourselves or even of human trafficking. We’re just trying to work out what happened to these kids. So, I took a very challenging journey in a very old Russian prop plane that had chickens in the aisle that I did not know whether we were going to get there safely. To then in a very old Land Cruiser in these like horrendous roads that something of which I had never seen the light of day before. So, it got to the border area and started to see these children being traded through the border into them finding out what happened. And many of them of which we now call it human trafficking was being traded through the border. Many of them going into Thailand as beggars. I can remember strikingly one four-year-old girl who had a six-month-old baby on her hip which was the same age as my own kids at the time. And she was totally responsible for this child. She didn’t know where her family, her parents, had been. She just had lost them on the streets in Bangkok somewhere. And it was at that moment that I knew that this was going to be my life work. And that kept me in Cambodia for 19 and a half years.