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FEMALE SPEAKER: American Himalayan Foundation could not
make it today, but Therese will be talking about both
organizations and their great work.
So today is International Women's Day, which started
back in the early 1900s to promote
civil rights for women.
We've come a really long way in most respects, but human
rights for women and girls in some corners of
the world have not.
I'm excited to introduce you to the work of Community
Partners International and American Himalayan Foundation.
They're doing amazing things on the ground to prevent girls
from falling victim in Nepal, Burma, and Thailand.
Therese Caouette is executive director at CPI and has worked
with refugees, migrants, and displaced persons in Southeast
Asia for more than 30 years, together with community-based
organizations, international bodies, foundations and
academic institutions.
Please welcome Therese.
[APPLAUSE]
THERESE CAOUETTE: Hello, thanks.
As Aya said, I've been working largely in Southeast Asia.
And I worked primarily in the beginning with refugees and
displaced populations in the late '70s and early '80s at
the end of the Vietnam War.
And during that time although I was working with refugees I
found that more and more young girls and young adults were
finding themselves in very vulnerable situations outside
of the refugee camps.
But when I started to do specifically work on
trafficking, I found that most of the people at that time in
the early '90s or late '80s were being trafficked to I
think what we--
the image at least I had at the time, or I think people
still have of trafficking is people being abducted or
tricked in their village, brought across borders and put
into brothels.
Very typical brothels where you have girls locked in and
they have numbers on their chest 1 through 25, and you go
in and you pick which number you want.
Now we saw that.
That was very typical in the '80s and early '90s.
But I've seen that it's changed dramatically in the
last 10, 20 years, and I'd like to talk about that today
because I feel that a lot of us have a very different--
including myself-- still have these other images of
trafficking that are not what we see on the ground today.
So I'd like to kind of walk through that and I'd like to
make this presentation more presentation of a discourse or
discussion about trafficking, and not me telling you what
trafficking is.
Because I think it's so nuanced and so complex that
we're all really struggling to try to understand it and
respond to it.
So I'd like to kind of present to you the challenges that I
find in my work, and ask you to kind of think that through
with me as you think about these issues and what you're
aware of in other contexts.
So I'd like to ask you to maybe just turn to the person
next to you, or--
because I know we have several people who are not here with
us physically--
to just think for a minute or two how you would define
trafficking.
How do you use it, and if you just turn to two or three
people next to you and just try to figure out what does it
mean to you.
What words do you use?
How do you use trafficking?
Just take one minute.
I'll just do it real briefly.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
OK, let me bring you back.
I want to say that I think if we took a poll, we'd come up
with a whole bunch of different images, and I think
this is what I see in my work all the time.
And I think it's not only a problem that I face.
I see that the international community is faced wtih these
same dilemmas.
If you look at the United Nations today, we have a wide
range of conventions and treaties and declarations on
trafficking, all of which have very narrow definitions, and
have reflected that period of time in
which they were written.
And yet what we find is they really don't apply today to
the kind of dynamics that we're finding.
And there's been an effort by the UN to try to identify some
special repertoires, some working groups, to try to
explore a broader or more relevant definition for
trafficking that we can use to help deal with the issues that
we're faced with.
And yet this is in-process, and we don't really have a
very clear good working definition.
And as a result, when you bring countries together or we
bring non-government organizations or donors or
communities together, we're often not
talking the same language.
And I think this is one of the biggest problems that we face
with trafficking is that we have all different images, and
when we sit down together we don't have a way
to talk about it.
At the same time--
over 20 years I think I've been working on this issue--
I cannot find any communities or girls who have been
trafficked who identify themselves as
a trafficked person.
And if you talk to villagers, "Have you been trafficked?
Has anybody here been trafficked?" they would say
immediately, "No, not in our village." But if you ask them
about vulnerabilities and migration it's a completely
different discussion that we have that follows.
So I just want to preface our discussion today that this, I
would argue, is probably the most important point when you
start to talk about this issue.
To just explore with one another what you're actually
talking about and what images or what dynamics
you're really exploring.
What we see today is that migration is happening in the
greatest numbers than we've ever seen in our time.
There's over 250 million people who are living outside
of their countries.
That doesn't mean that they're all undocumented.
It certainly doesn't mean that they're all trafficked, but
they're all moving, and in ways that we've never actually
had to deal with in our world.
And although both men and women are traveling and are
moving, women are by far more vulnerable.
And this is largely because most of women's work is in the
informal economy.
In markets, in agriculture, domestic work,
babysitting, day-care.
We see it in our country, you see it around the world, that
many of the jobs that women hold are not in the formal
labor sector.
Also much of women's work is irregular.
Their part-time work, they do piece work, number of pieces,
in this example, the number of fish they serve.
It's seasonal.
They aren't often in the regular economy.
They're often less educated.
Their gender roles are more defined, and what we find in
developing countries is they marry much earlier.
They're are also in conflict situations among refugees.
80% of all refugees, the millions of refugees in the
world, are largely women and children.
So women really do make up the majority of people who are at
risk in the migration context.
Today I'm going to focus on the work in Burma, and that's
where I spent--
this keeps moving, sorry--
the work in Burma.
And that's where I've worked for the past 20 years.
Although I've worked in Southeast Asia as a whole,
Burma by far has had the most complex and difficult
migration dynamics in the region.
The reasons for that is that it's surrounded by the largest
developing countries in the area.
Thailand, India, China, so there's a lot of opportunity
outside their borders.
It's an extremely poor country.
There's been a lot of ethnic conflict and warfare for the
past 50 years.
And there are enormous ethnic minority populations around
the country.
There are 36 major ethnic minority populations and 136
if you count all the minor ethnic minorities.
The vulnerabilities of ethnic minority communities--
not speaking the major languages, not able to access
health services or education in the countries where they
live, is a big risk factor for the people who are being
trafficked today.
Let me just jump back to say although Eileen from the
American Himalayan Foundation was unable to join us today,
one of the ways that we started to collaborate in our
work was that we both were on a panel and we realized that
the discussions and the presentations we were
providing were almost identical.
Even though she focuses her work in Nepal, we could have
used the same case examples, we could have used the same
presentations, almost verbatim.
And one of things that I'd like to leave you with is the
understanding that these dynamics are really not
country-specific.
It's amazing to me when I go around to speak, or meet
others, who are working on these issues the similarities
in Eastern Europe, the similarities of Iraqi refugees
who are fleeing to Syria and Jordan as illegal immigrants.
You see these dynamics playing out all around the world.
And so even though they couldn't be here today to
present another case example, I think what I'll be able to
present today will highlight very closely to what the
reality is they do on the ground.
So what I'd like to talk a little bit about is these
current dynamics of trafficking that I find
happening in the 21st century, in the past 10 years.
They are so different from how I started.
In Southeast Asia, these are just the beginnings of the
infrastructure of the roads that have been developed in
the last 10 years.
Prior to that, certainly 15 years ago, but for many
countries as early as 10 years ago, all of these
borders were locked.
You couldn't travel across borders.
And that has fueled not only migration, but trade, consumer
goods, drug trafficking, a lot of issues that have emerged in
the region have scaled up considerably as a result of
all the infrastructure.
But it's not only roads.
It's also cellphones, it's a lot of infrastructure
electricity.
With that comes access to the internet.
All of the resources that have come in the past 10 years have
really changed these communities dramatically.
AUDIENCE: What are the black lines?
THERESE CAOUETTE: Say again.
AUDIENCE: What are the black lines--
THERESE CAOUETTE: The roads.
The new roads that have been built in the last 10 years are
linked across borders.
And so now as you see that young people--
their dreams and aspirations are changing very quickly.
They see the cell phones, they see the internet, they see the
axis of opportunities.
Even though their absolute poverty has improved, the
disparity between what they have in their villages and
what they see in the cities is dramatic.
And they want to be a part of it.
They want to travel just like our kids do, or our friends.
They want the economic opportunities and security
that they see others have around them.
And they want to travel.
They want to explore a world that's bigger than themselves.
They want to move beyond the gender tradition roles that
they've been told are the norm, are their expectations.
And they want to do more in their life.
But they're entering a global market that is looking for
cheap labor.
They're entering the global market that's trying to find
the cheapest race to the bottom for
the cheapest workers.
And they're entering in an environment where they're
promoting tourism.
Governments are also encouraging exportation of
labor because by exporting labor, they're able to deal
with the unemployment or
underemployment in their country.
And they're also able to obtain foreign exchange.
The amount of remittances worldwide from people in
developing countries sending money home is now in 2011
reached $351 billion.
That is more than three times all of the foreign development
assistance that has gone to developing countries during
that same period of time.
And it's also almost about the same amount of money as direct
investment in those countries.
It is an enormous amount of money and governments are
promoting their nationals to go abroad to work.
But when they recruit, people in these villages have no idea
if this is a formal arrangement organized by the
government, or if this is a black market agent under the
table who's going to bring across the border and give
them a real job.
They have no way to understand who's who.
So in this context, they see opportunity, they want to go
for it, and they have no idea to how to
decipher which is which.
So I'd like to tell you a story.
This is a village that I worked in
for many, many years.
And I have a daughter who's now 22, but at the time--
this was about 15 years ago--
we would go frequently to this village, and she got to know
all of these children in this village.
And she would often play this rubber band jump rope game
with these girls and they were very good at it, and she would
always look forward to it.
So this is a last picture we had of them
in the fourth grade.
When we came back the next year she ran off to find the
friends and they were all gone, because they had all
gone to get a job in the city.
Either in Bangkok, in Kunming, in China, or over to India.
She was living in Bangkok at the time and very excited, so
she'd run around to all of the houses to find out which girls
had gone to Bangkok to get their addresses or their phone
numbers so she could call them when she got home.
And that any of the parents had a number or a contact for
any of their kids.
And this is the hole that they go into.
And the question I always want to raise is, are these
children trafficked?
This is the dilemma, and if we only look at quote
"trafficking," we look at the end game,
what happened to them.
But this doesn't really solve the risk, and so somehow I
feel we really need to start to turn it around and we need
to look at the vulnerabilities of these kids.
And what do we need to do to make sure that if they want to
move beyond their village that they have the skills and the
resources and the knowledge to be able to do so safely or
with some opportunity for recourse, or redress, if they
get in a vulnerable situation.
If we just wait to define which one of these kids are
trafficked, it's kind of too late.
What we see happening on the borders where I work in Burma,
is that most of these young people are looking for jobs.
When they cross the border, there's one area that I just
went to recently and I've been going for a number of years,
and the Thai factories are building their factories right
up along the border, just like we did with Mexico.
Right up along the border so we can get very cheap labor,
half the price of Thai laborers.
And these Burmese young people come up to the border to work,
and there are about 4,000 or 5,000 who cross the border
every morning, get in trucks, and go to the factories where
they're sent to work like day labor.
You can really do anything you want to these young girls
because they have no documentation, they have no
rights, they're illegally in the country, and they're
working under the table.
And in that context, you can not pay them, you can pay them
the whole amount, you can make them stay, work all night, not
work the next day, or take them further into another city
and not let them return.
And they have no way to negotiate that.
And we see this dynamic over and over again.
They live in really horrific conditions and very difficult
labor conditions with very little protection of
sanitation or the environment in which they work.
And more and more of these young girls and the children
of migrant workers are becoming stateless.
They have no identification.
They have no citizenship.
And so they can't access health services in any
country, or education.
They will be their whole life illegal.
And if I did a report today, or if I really focus what I
think is the most urgent issue, I would say it's this
growing number of stateless children.
Migrants having children abroad.
The children are illegal because they're not legal in
the country that they're in.
They can't go back, or they're from ethnic minority
communities that were never registered in the first place.
And so they never had a identity, and when they left,
they can't go back with any identity.
This population is significant and growing.
And so in the end, they're illegal.
And they can be deported, arrested at any point in time,
if the employer doesn't want to pay them.
If the floods in Thailand, for example--
now we blame migrants because we don't have enough jobs, so
we're going round them up and deport them.
We have a whole dynamics of these things happening in our
own country.
And so we just round them up and deport them and that
somehow solves the problem.
And this cycle just continues like this.
I believe that the real way to change this is to try to think
about what we can really do to empower the young girls and
the young children--
youth--
who are migrating.
I think that the typical responses that we see in our
media and that I was very involved in the early years--
shelters, prevention, trying to warn them about the dangers
of migration, rescuing those who are in the brothels or in
these horrible factories, trying to help them return,
reintegrate back into their community.
But what I've learned over the years that keeps them in the
position of a victim.
It doesn't really help them with their life goals and
their dreams and their aspirations for something
beyond the village.
What they really need is some life skills, some education,
some resources and opportunities so that they can
actually fulfill their aspirations to be more than
miring at 14 or 15 years old and following in their same
traditional patterns that they've seen their mothers and
generations before them.
They want something else, and so I think that our typical
responses to trafficking have to be challenged
and mine have been.
To really emphasize a lot more working with these communities
and with these young people who are at risk.
But working with those girls is on the picture.
About what they want to do about what their conditions
are in the workforce, what kind of jobs they want.
Studies, life skills that they hope to attain.
Otherwise they just have to pray each time and hope next
time they migrate they'll have better luck.
And so what we've tried to focus on more and more is
schools, both formal and informal schools.
What we've found is a lot of children don't go to school
when they're young, and so by the time they're 12, 13, 14
years old, they can't go to the first grade.
So they've got to start working with literacy
programs, life skill programs, other informal courses or
classes that can take place in the evening, that can work
with illiterate populations and build them into a program
that reaches and meets their needs.
There's a big challenge of trying to get schools to the
remote rural areas, especially to ethnic minority
populations.
They speak very isolated, small languages that aren't
very common, and very hard to find teachers who teach in
those languages.
They are very hard to get them to stop
working during the daytime.
They've got a lot of
responsibilities to keep the family.
A lot of them are married very young.
What we find is that we need to do a lot to actually get
them to school.
What I see happening in some of the remote areas is that
they're trying to prepare boarding schools for kids to
come to stay in so that they can stay Monday through Friday
and not have to walk so far and actually attend the
schools that are closer to the cities or the towns.
This one that I just saw a few weeks ago--
and they set this up themselves.
But obviously we should be doing more to support these
kind of efforts by the community to keep the girls
and young children in school.
And in addition, I find over and over again people asking
for preschools or pre-kindergarten programs.
At first I used to keep thinking, well maybe don't we
need to focus on primary school
first, or literacy first.
And what I've learned is actually that the preschools
are actually really key to getting the older siblings
into school, to getting the parents working and employed
so they don't have to ask their younger children to work
in their place, to getting children literate and able to
communicate in the national language so that when they go
to school they understand the language and have more
likelihood to succeed.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
THERESE CAOUETTE: No, sure.
I just have one more point and then I'll actually stop.
But this is probably my last, so I can stop now.
Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: You mentioned that preschool encourages
adults to get a job.
THERESE CAOUETTE: To work.
When the children go to school, the mothers are free
to work, or they don't have to ask the older kids.
The question was, so how does that help parents be employed?
So we found that preschool and also alternative schools have
been very important in the American
Himalayan Foundation also.
Most of us have really focused the majority of our work on
schools, both formal and informal.
And that we really need to work with the aspirations and
the goals of the communities and those children and young
adults, so that they can actually migrate, travel,
move, take jobs with some skills and some knowledge of
their rights.
So I think this is a very important--
while at the same time negotiating a environment that
respects their rights.
I think that's the challenge for us as outside to those
communities.
That we need to understand and struggle to understand the
ongoing discourse on trafficking.
How these issues are changing, how our policy of our
government impacts those communities and the
opportunities that young people are offered.
Our multinational corporations, the policies and
rules that they practice when they're abroad.
I think there's a number of considerations that we have to
really be challenged by, and I'd like to leave you with
these before I give the microphone to Paula.
I think we have to be very aware of
how we "other" others.
And I do it all the time, but we see them somehow as
different from us, and they're not any different than what my
daughter wants.
She wants to travel, she wants to see more than I did, she
wants to have a world that's bigger than Bainbridge Island
up in Washington.
She wants something bigger than that, and so do these
kids, and we have to really be careful.
And parents want their children to stretch beyond
what they know is possible.
Because sometimes I get really frustrated when I see in the
media and I hear people talking that somehow parents
sold their kids, or they minimize it.
And it's really not a very fair or empathetic
understanding of the context with which they're trying to
raise their children.
I think we also have to work to increase our own tolerance
and understanding of cultures and the different practices.
It's very difficult for me.
Like I said, I was just able to travel in Burma the last
month, and a lot of girls are marrying at 14
and 15 years old.
It's very hard to work with this.
It's hard to see these young kids, and yet you can't have a
simplistic answer to this and expect change.
But you really need to communicate this into the
issues and work with families and
communities on these issues.
There needs to be basic labor rights, even for people who
don't have legal status.
We have to do it in our own country, and we have to do it
around the world.
You can't really be an illegal person.
You have some basic rights no matter where you are.
And I think it's important to recognize and work towards
formalizing women's work--
domestic workers, babysitters, in the markets.
We have a lot of informal work--
farm workers--
that is not recognized as formal labor, even again in
our own country.
And I think we should focus on this labor exploitation and
not on controlling movements of people.
Focusing this problem on keeping people in one place
and not allowing them to move is what results in this cycle
of deportation and illegal hidden dynamics that people
can't get out of.
And we have to recognize that we have large unmet labor
needs, and that we are going around the world trying to
find cheaper markets.
And that we need to look at how these practices take place
and how to protect and promote a fair labor exchange.
I was just in Burma the last month, and I suppose some of
you may know that the country's slowly opening up.
And you could not believe how many multinational companies
are descending in weeks on this place and trying to set
up their factories.
Because this is 60 million people with no work, very
cheap labor.
And if we don't have some mechanisms with which we can
monitor and protect and promote their rights, then
this cycle only continues at a even more rapid
pace than we see today.
And I think we need to hear and work with communities on
the ground to meet their needs.
As I mentioned earlier, none of these communities see
themselves or any of the young people in their communities as
being trafficked.
That discourse is not theirs.
So if we want to really deal with these issues, we're going
to have to really talk in a language and listen to the
concerns and the realities that they perceive in their
communities in order to change these dynamics.
So I'd like to leave this with you, with some of the things
that I struggle with in the field.
And I would like my colleague Paula Bock, who works very
closely with me, to talk to you a little bit about what
she does on this end to complement that work.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
PAULA BOCK: Hi, my name's Paula Bock and I work on
community communications and development.
So that's telling the stories of the people in Burma and
along its borders and helping to get support.
I want to tell you a little bit about how I got involved
and then how if you're
interested you can get involved.
So not too long ago I was a journalist.
I had a long career as a journalist.
But I also had a secret life.
And that was volunteering with my husband, who's a doctor, at
a refugee clinic run by a really amazing
woman refugee doctor.
And while we were there-- this is back in 1996--
we crossed the border from Thailand in a pickup truck at
night over the hills to a little village in
rebel-controlled Burma, where they hadn't seen of
pediatrician in years.
And I fell in love with the children, playing with them.
And these are two of the girls, [? Shua ?]
and [? Omoo ?], and all the kids were really delightful.
These two were good friends in particular, and in fact they
were in preschool.
So you heard about the importance of preschools, and
they used to sing the ABC song.
Anyway, after my year off--
I had taken a sabbatical for my job--
we came back to Seattle where we live, and then I found out
that the village had fallen to the military.
It was just my heart, you know that something had happened.
So I convinced the newspaper to send me back on a special
assignment, and I was trying to find the girls.
I didn't tell the newspaper that.
I said I was going to write about the civil war in Burma.
And I couldn't get to them because there was this war.
But over the years I kept trying to get contact and I
would hear things.
And as they grew up, what happened.
Their village was occupied by enemy soldiers, right?
They were very poor.
One of them was an orphan, so all of these factors made them
so vulnerable.
And like so many other girls, so vulnerable.
Would they leave the village to try to find work?
Would soldiers try to take advantage of them?
What happened?
So what happened was actually a really good thing.
After several years they were both able to get out of the
village and get into boarding school.
So now they're 20--
around 19, 20-- one wants to be a teacher and the other
wants to be a doctor.
So it's like oh yeah, that's a great story, but there are 43
million people like them who are displaced still.
I mean those are two of 43 million who had a good story,
and so that is why I thought I've got to do more.
Anyway, so I got more involved and I was here in America,
what can you do here?
I got involved with a little group and we did raffles and
all kinds of things like.
That I took ESL courses, ESL tutoring, and I
went over and I tutored.
I taught aerobics to refugee medics over there.
And in America went and told people about Burma.
I wrote about it.
Those happened to be my skill sets.
You have other skill sets.
So here are 12 ways to get involved if you're interested.
Share your expertise.
I know a lot of people have expertise here in technology.
One of our colleagues is doing really interesting project,
trying to get it off the ground with using phones,
interactive voice recognition, to provide health care
information to people on the move.
So that could be trafficked or migrant people, many of them
are illiterate, so it's great to get that information about
malaria and reproductive health over the phone.
But there's solar-powered phones, there's a lot
going on with that.
Something simple for you is setting up and training using
Google Apps and other Google tools.
At our organization--
and this is both in the States here and
with our local partners.
I mean, we touch the Google tools
and use them so clumsily.
So just to have somebody kind of hold our hand and say, OK
here are your needs, you should really be using this
and this is how you do it.
SCO optimization, graphic design--
if there's a website wizard or goddess who could help, you
know we use Drupal, that would be great.
And not just with our organization, but any
organization that does this kind of thing, share with your
friends, learn about trafficking
or women and girls.
Whatever your passion is--
Burma, Nepal--
and share that with your friends.
Host conversations, post, blog, talk about it, engage
your network.
We have wonderful supporters and donors
who do a baking book.
They've done crafts things.
It doesn't really matter what it is, the idea is to engage.
One of our supporters is a Broadway producer, and she had
a Broadway bash.
So it just depends on your expertise and your contacts.
Donations are always welcome, and I know there's an employee
matching gift, so that's helpful.
Online friend-to-friend fund raising, we're
starting to do that.
And if you spend a lot of time online with your communities
online, that might be something to
get involved with.
And then there's also travel, to broaden your horizons and
look for volunteer opportunities.
So thank you very much, and those are--
FEMALE SPEAKER: And now questions and answers.
PAULA BOCK: Yep.
THERESE CAOUETTE: People also listening in want to ask
questions, feel free.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
THERESE CAOUETTE: OK, just let me repeat it for the people
are listening in.
She was asking why is it that people don't identify with the
word trafficking?
Is it the experience of trafficking
itself or just the word?
Is that pretty much--
so I would say that it's a little bit of both.
They don't have that word, of course, in their vocabulary,
so that doesn't make sense.
And if you if you translate it, it doesn't really work.
But they also don't have the concept.
I mean if anybody have been fortune of to travel in some
of these really remote areas, the trust and the kindness,
the generosity is so amazing that they just don't believe
people would take advantage of anybody to that extent.
I think they really fundamentally
don't believe that.
They wouldn't have it in their world view.
But even when they face migration--
then I think that there's another issue.
When it does happen there's so much shame, especially for the
girls, that when they come back they would
never talk about it.
So it perpetuates that cycle.
When you talk about vulnerabilities it's a little
bit less personal.
It happens to everybody in different contexts.
So people feel a little bit more comfortable to talk about
the vulnerabilities of other people, maybe not of
themselves.
But even in that context I just don't feel that
trafficking, and certainly the trafficking--
because we ourselves don't even know what we're talking
when we use that word.
They themselves also are very confused by it.
But migration is much more concrete.
People are moving, there are risks, things happen.
It's much more concrete--
obvious-- to them what we're talking about.
So it's a combination of the two, I guess is what I'm
trying to say.
Yes please.
AUDIENCE: I really loved hearing about [INAUDIBLE]?
THERESE CAOUETTE: Yes.
She's asking about--
education is great, but then there's a void.
There's a lack of jobs that people face when they actually
do finish school, or become literate.
And I think that's very much a reality.
I think the whole effort to do livelihoods and try to work
with women and find other alternative to employment is
very critical.
And I think that there are opportunities, people are
working on it.
The infrastructure of the new roads.
These are the positive things of that.
It's bringing more jobs.
It's bringing a way to sell their produce.
It's bringing markets.
You see people in remote areas on this last trip sewing
handbags, things that they can sell in the market.
That wasn't there before.
So the development of the infrastructure isn't only bad,
it just brings new dynamics.
And some of the positive parts of it does bring new markets.
So yes, that's an ongoing challenge and there are
ongoing struggles to try to find ways
that they can be employed.
Yes, please.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
THERESE CAOUETTE: Tell me the name again.
Sorry.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
THERESE CAOUETTE: OK
AUDIENCE: You made this statement already [INAUDIBLE]?
THERESE CAOUETTE: OK, the question was, what can men do?
And if men had a different attitude, wouldn't some of
this change?
And I would say it's yes.
There's two ways.
One of the ways-- in the beginning we focused way too
much on women and girls.
And I think what we're learning too is that this is a
dynamic and something that affects the whole community.
So I say it's both ways.
I think we too as organizations have to see this
as a community issue.
And I think for men, it's important for them to speak to
women's rights.
What's always the hardest for me is the
girls that I work with--
especially the girls--
their self esteem is so low that they actually believe
that it's their fault that this has happened.
So I think promoting and speaking to women about girls
and about women in a positive--
I think that happens in our day-to-day life.
One of the most disturbing things for me is when Western
travelers go to Asia and they are really awful tourists,
quite frankly.
It's just disrespectful.
And then even for myself as a woman, I don't stand up to it
as much as they should.
Sometimes you should really say something.
And I think for men to say it to other men or at least not
to participate.
To be not other and to put yourself in that context.
I think we all have a lot of challenges in
how we "other" people.
And I would say that both in our context and also when we
look abroad that's a challenge.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
THERESE CAOUETTE: Yes.
Yes.
That's where I think we need to grow as an organization.
What we've been trying to do in the last few years, but we
were very slow to approach it that way.
And if I could turn back the time and the clock, I would
have done that much earlier.
Because I think it's fundamental to
changing these dynamics.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
THERESE CAOUETTE: Oh I'm sorry, yeah.
He said, wouldn't it be better if got boys in the schools
involved in girls issues and rights of the female child.
And to be more respectful of one another, and I agreed and
I thought we should actually been doing that much sooner
than we have.
Just in the last few years we start to see these programs as
being coed for both boys and girls, instead of pulling the
girls aside and working on these issues
just with female children.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
THERESE CAOUETTE: To Burma.
Yeah.
Yeah one of the things that we do, maybe might be why you
asked this question, I'm not sure, but we do we do a lot of
very, very small grants to community leaders--
and to repeat the question, sorry.
What can you do to promote strong women
role models for girls?
Is that pretty accurate?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
THERESE CAOUETTE: And what's possible to do that in those
communities.
And one of the things that we've been doing a lot of is
trying to do very, very small grants to women in those
communities to take a leadership role.
To organize girls to get involved, to do livelihood
projects, to take a more prominent
role in their community.
And that a lot of that is just small grants.
We've been actually reading a very interesting book I would
encourage you to read called Positive Deviance.
To look at women in those communities who are taking
small risks in their community to do something different, to
make a difference, and to build on that.
Not to bring it in from the outside, or a program in from
the outside, but see what they're doing already in those
communities.
This is a book we've been reading in our program team
that has been very inspirational.
We just shared parts of it with a number of our partners
in the field and translated into several languages.
It's a very thought-provoking approach to development that
I'd encourage you to take a look at.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
THERESE CAOUETTE: Yeah, they're saving circles that
we've done.
Actually a lot of them with people who are *** positive
and have been ostracized in their community.
But ways to get them organized and to work with each other.
Not only but also with some women's groups.
But finding they're very small and it's actually very
difficult to do, because no big philanthropy or donor or
even international organization wants to give out
a $8,000 grant.
And it's very hard to monitor that.
So to set up networks in the communities or in the country
where that's possible.
So you give a big grant and then that network can give out
smaller grants.
But you have to set up something that's different
than the model we currently have for development to make
those kind of small differences work.
Yep.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
THERESE CAOUETTE: So the question is, how do we recover
or how do we know if people been able to be tracked or
returned home after they've been sent abroad.
Or after they've gone to look for work or possibly been
trafficked.
And I would say it's incredibly difficult.
The most that we can do is work on both sides.
We work both on the China side of the border and the Burma
side, the Thai side and the Burma side.
And through those networks, we can try to track.
But it's very, very difficult, and we have families and
parents who have been waiting for their kids for years.
And I just actually last week met someone a woman who was
waiting for her husband to return yet, She hasn't heard
from him in three years.
So she has no idea if he's gone off on a fishing boat and
not been allowed to come back to land, or he's been put in a
factory or he died.
She may never know.
This happens a lot, and it's very difficult to track,
unfortunately.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
THERESE CAOUETTE: She's asking reintegrating back home and do
you see them being trafficked again or moving again.
I think is a vicious cycle.
I think once they've gone abroad, they come back.
It's very difficult to return home.
There's still no jobs there.
And that's why I showed that picture of them
praying at the shrine.
They think OK, I'll have a good prayer and next time
hopefully I won't have such bad luck, or I'll have better
luck and I'll try again.
And this cycle just goes on and on.
About the thing we were talking about at lunch just
before I came is it's also it is very difficult for people
to get remittances to send their money back home.
And this is one of things you're talking about with the
new cell phone banking.
That's very exciting, because possibly if they could remit
their money back home-- send it home safely.
Instead, now they're carrying it all on their body.
So everybody knows they have all the money.
They're ripped off all the time, constantly, so they end
up back home with nothing and then it starts all over again.
And sometimes I really believe if we could get a safe way for
that money to get home, they could actually start a small
business or they'd have some capital to do something.
But because we don't have that set up very easily-- the
banking system's so weak, there's no banks in these
rural areas, there's not a remittance system, and so the
cycle just keeps going on and on again.
It's very hard to break it.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
THERESE CAOUETTE: This is asking if there's any other
development projects that are also helping all of us deal
with this issue, like roads or cell phones, banking.
All of it has its pros and cons.
But I would say, one of things I often tell people is even in
these villages, almost every village I showed you, all of
those kids--
well, they all have access to a cell phone.
Somebody's got a cell phone.
They don't have electricity, but they use the solar-powered
something and they've got access to a cell phone.
And a lot of those communities have Gmail accounts.
Those kids give me their Gmail accounts.
Now they have no internet, but they know
that Gmail's out there.
And either somebody set them up an account or somebody will
come through with a smartphone and let them rent the access
to the smartphone for a couple minutes or hours.
Even up in the northern Burma with China, kids are giving me
their Gmail accounts.
So I think it's exciting and there's opportunities.
Even with our partners, I can GTalk with them.
Development's changed completely since 30 years ago
when I went out to a remote area and you'd send a telex
every month on how things are going.
It's exciting and there's a lot of opportunity.
At the same time, there's also a lot of risk.
A lot of opportunities that these young people don't know
how to evaluate or understand or be savvy with.
They don't have the worldview to be able to move with this
technology safely.
So it's a mix.
I think it's the same things that are positive also have
their challenges.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
THERESE CAOUETTE: Most of them are illiterate.
This is why Paula was mentioning one of these things
with voice recognition.
That they're thinking of trying to do some health care
services with voice recognition.
That's so interesting.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
THERESE CAOUETTE: Say again one more time.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
THERESE CAOUETTE: The question is, are we working with
partners to utilize Google Apps more effectively.
And the answer is, we're trying to learn how to utilize
Google Apps.
I think our partners really want it.
They're asking us all the time.
We come from the development world.
So a lot of this is trying to find new partners, even in our
own organization or in the countries also that can help
us learn and move with the opportunities that exist.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
PAULA BOCK: That was a great question about partners.
And I just want to clarify, as our name is Community Partners
International, we have indigenous partners--
over 100 indigenous partners.
They're local people, and they work with the communities to
improve health care, to improve education.
So we call them our partners.
Are some of them on Google Apps?
I know at least one of them is.
And then our partners who help us and
provide pro bono services.
For example, our website was set up by wonderful partner
who works with Tiffany Asia.
So we need a partner to help us do our Google Apps because
we're doing it so clumsily.
Yes, we would love that--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
PAULA BOCK: Oh you do?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
PAULA BOCK: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
PAULA BOCK: OK.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
PAULA BOCK: Oh wow.
Well that would be wonderful.
Thank you.
Yes.
Yes.
Thanks.
THERESE CAOUETTE: I think partly because we don't know
it so well, it's very difficult for us to help the
people in the field think about how to use it.
And sometimes now with all the people coming into Burma, for
example-- but you could talk about other
countries as well--
it's very hard to see our partners who've worked there
in very, very difficult
circumstances for so many years.
They are being overwhelmed by all these international
organizations who come in and they've got the website, they
have all the resources, they know how to use these tools.
And our partners lose their voice because they don't know
how to enter and engage in that.
And I think we really need some people who have different
skill sets than we have to work with them.
Yeah.
PAULA BOCK: [INAUDIBLE]?
THERESE CAOUETTE: So the question was, do you see a
generation gap between the younger generation and their
aspirations in with the parents and the traditions.
And I would say certainly yes.
But I would say that most of the parents still encourage
their children.
They're very proud of their children when they go abroad
and go to work.
They're very honored, but they don't consider all the changes
that are going to happen.
So when they come back changed and not respecting the
traditions, then the conflicts arise.
But they're caught, and at the same time, if they bring home
some money and they have a new aluminum roof and some new
things in the house, they're very proud.
So it's a conflict, I think.
And maybe not all so different than our own families.
But they are very proud when their children go abroad.
That they're working in another country, that they're
learning another language, that they've traveled beyond.
But at the same time, when they come home there's
terrible clashes, actually.
OK, it's time.
So anyway, thank you very much.
It was great questions.
It was really wonderful to be able to come here.
Thanks.