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Michael Paulsen Chronicle
Attorney An Phong Vo's work with asylum-seekers is now taking her to Bangkok.
"Policemen pulled on their hair and beat their heads on the beds and on the ground, and there was blood everywhere," said Vu, who led a strike and eventually fled to Thailand and finally Houston.
Her daring rebellion and escape - as well as years spent with other trafficking victims in transit in Thailand - helped motivate the Houston office of the nonprofit Vietnamese American Boat People SOS to ramp up its outreach to asylum seekers in Asia.
Her story and the stories of others like her also provided personal motivation and a new mission for human rights activist An Phong Vo, an attorney based at the nonprofit's West Houston office who began working with trafficking victims in 2007. Along the way, Vo became one of the leading U.S. experts in helping victims to obtain special visas to stay in the United States and stabilize their lives.
Now, Vo's calling will take her to Bangkok, where she will try to aid an estimated 500 asylum-seekers - including victims of human trafficking - living in donated apartments after fleeing oppression from Vietnam and slavery conditions in other countries.
People in need
Vo, who escaped Vietnam as a child and fluently speaks Vietnamese, graduated from law school at Louisiana State University. Almost immediately, she began helping 20 women trafficking victims who resettled in Houston after fleeing conditions exposed in a criminal case against the owners of the Daewoosa sweatshop in American Samoa.
Later, she assisted Central American women held prisoner and ultimately freed from traffickers after a federal raid of cantinas in Houston. She also helped some women reunite with the children they left behind in their home countries. She began to assist many Vietnamese Americans harmed in recent hurricanes, as well.
In April on a preliminary visit to Bangkok for her new assignment, Vo met with asylum-seekers in Bangkok. Many were too afraid of arrest and deportation to leave their apartments; some children had no schooling or toys and had to sit silently for hours to avoid detection.
Vo, who spent three years in a refugee camp as a child, became convinced the project would be worth the risk, both personal and professional, to go abroad to help.
"It is the chance of a lifetime to be able to do groundwork and provide assistance," Vo said. "And Thailand is the hub of what's happening with international organizations and civil society in Asia. So I'd like to be in the midst of that."
Finding inspiration
The story of Phuong-Anh Vu's recent escape helped provide additional inspiration to Vo and others in Houston after the human trafficking victim and strike leader resettled here last year. It was Vo's mentor, Boat People SOS's executive director Nguyen Dinh Thang, based at the organization's Virginia office, who supplied Vu with money she needed to survive and to escape from captivity at the Jordan factory in 2007.
In an interview, Vu, now a Houston Community College student, said she'd been living in a remote village in the jungles of Northern Vietnam when she heard she could earn a $10,000 salary plus expenses by taking a three-year contract at a Taiwanese-owned sewing factory in Jordan. But after she joined about 275 others at the factory, they were locked inside a walled compound and forced to work 15-hour days, seven days a week.
Vu organized a strike and later found a cellphone to call a reporter who posted a plea for help on a website. The first cellphone response came from Thang, the BPSOS executive director in America.
"I asked him where was America," Vu remembers. "I didn't know."
Thang sent an envoy to Jordan with $3,000 cash to help.
Vu escaped to Thailand and, after nearly three years of paperwork, was allowed to immigrate to America.
But neither she nor Vo have forgotten others left behind.
"I want to ask for help not from Vietnamese-Americans only, but from all Americans to maybe skip one breakfast or one coffee to help Boat People SOS so they can help someone like me or a woman in the same situation because I've been there," she said.
