Holland Prior is an ordained pastor with the Wesleyan Church and a graduate of Azusa Pacific University. She also received a Master of Divinity degree from APU. Holland was one of my team leaders on a mission trip to New Orleans in the summer of 2008. She traveled to Cambodia from February 12-22. Before she left, I talked to her about the coming journey.
Cover photo courtesy of Billy Scanlan.
Dominic Laing: As far as this trip to Cambodia, how did you come to this team and this time and this place?
Holland Prior: It was a very bizarre series of events that I can only describe as, ‘This is what God had for me at this very time.’ I’ve, over the last couple of years, been getting more and more educated on human trafficking, and getting more involved in what my particular denomination, the Wesleyan Church, is doing to combat human trafficking. Back in September I went to a conference at our headquarters, human trafficking and what we as a community can do, you know, like raising awareness, education and buying products not produced by slave labor and all that kind of stuff.
So, went to that conference, met some great people. That was in September. So a couple of months later I got this mass email, I think that was sent to everyone who attended the conference, like ‘Hey, we’re taking a trip [to Cambodia] in May.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, sweet, that’d be interesting. I’ll think about that after Christmas, when I have more time.’
I thought ‘That would be fascinating,’ because WorldHope, the organization I’m traveling with, who’s affiliated with the Wesleyan Church, has been in Cambodia for a long time. They run an assessment center where they do after-care and recovery for girls pulled out of brothels. So they work closely in conjunction with International Justice Mission and other organizations that raid brothels, pulls girls out, and they give the girls to WorldHope, essentially, and WorldHope does the after-care.
Then about a week before Christmas I got an email, specifically to me, that said, ‘Hey Holland, we’ve got a last minute opening on our February team. Are you interested? And I went, ‘Well, now that’s interesting.’
Finally I connect with [the trip coordinator], and she answers my questions, and she goes, ‘By the way, if you want to go on this trip, we need your stuff, like, yesterday, because we have to purchase airfare at least six weeks out and it’s six weeks out right now.’
So, I was, I remember distinctly, I was sitting in front of my computer and just went, (claps hands) ‘Okay.’ I turned around and I asked my boss, ‘How would you feel about me taking a couple of weeks off in the middle of the school year?’
Then I went right into the process of collecting all my application materials, because WorldHope requires that you submit a few references, and get all your proof that you have all your travel documents and everything. I basically drove straight to my pastor’s house and was like, ‘Here’s a reference, fill it out while I’m watching, because I have to go fax all this in right now.’
It was pretty crazy. I was able to track down everything that I needed that day, fax it all in. I had this conversation with the lady on Friday. By Wednesday, I had a plane ticket for Cambodia.
D: Wow. Incredible.
H: I’m still…I walked around for a couple of weeks – ‘I’m going to Cambodia. What just happened?’
D: How long are you going to be in Cambodia?
H: I will be there about ten days.
D: And it’s you and who else on the trip?
H: It is me and five other women, so there’s six of us total. I don’t know any of them. They are all out of a church in Buffalo, N.Y. Their church decided to put together this team to send a team over to Cambodia to work in the center. And the reason I got called in was, I guess, initially there was, I think four, there must’ve been four, that were gonna go, and then another woman signed up. WorldHope prefers to travel in even numbers, and they didn’t find anyone else at the church who wanted to go, so WorldHope — I still don’t know to this day who at WorldHope gave them my name — but WorldHope contacted me right away and said, ‘Do you want to go?’
D: So you’re working in the center?
H: Yes. They call it the assessment center, the girls are there for, I believe, up to 60 days. They’re between the ages of 4 and 14.
D: That young?
H: Yeah.
D: Serious?
H: Dead serious.
D: I would’ve thought they were like, 12 to 18.
H: Yeah. The girls are between the ages of 4 and 14 at the center, and I believe they can house up to 50 girls, and they’re usually full. During [their time there] they call it the assessment center because they kind of assess, ‘What’s the situation?’ Does the girl have a family to go back to? If she goes back to the family, are they going to sell her again?
And then they try to decide is the girl’s family safe? Is the family the reason she was in the brothel in the first place? Did they sell her? Was she kidnapped? Or somehow, was the family tricked? You know, like, ‘Hey, I’ll take her into the city so she can go to school and whatnot.’
D: And then she disappears.
H: (nods) So they assess what to do next. Does she go back to her family? Does she go into a long-term facility where she’s given some education and taught how to make a life for herself?
D: Does the assessment center offer any medical assistance, if necessary?
H: I believe so. I don’t know as many details as I think all the women from Buffalo, because I came on so late.
D: The girls that are in the assessment center, are they mainly coming from brothels? Or is it a combination of slave labor and sex trafficking?
H: It is my understanding that this specific center is sex trafficking. So the girls are coming from brothels.
D: And ages 4 to 14?
H: (nods) Ages 4 to 14. Which breaks my heart. Absolutely. I was, like you said, expecting 12 to 18 [year olds,] but when she said, ‘Oh no, all the girls are between 4 and 14,’ I almost cried right then. Four years old?
D: In your opinion, are people in Cambodia aware of what’s happening, and are people in the United States, or in your community, aware of what’s happening?
H: I can’t really speak for Cambodia. I haven’t been there before and this will be my first time. I don’t really know what the climate is. My general impression is people know what’s going on. Because you kind of know if a girl disappears, I mean you pretty much know what happened.
D: And as far as American awareness?
H: I think Americans are woefully uninformed, unaware, blissfully ignorant, whatever you want to call it.
D: What misconceptions do you think people may have about human trafficking? Like, my thought that the girls’ ages were between 12 to 18, when in fact they were much younger.
H: I think the biggest misconception is that these girls are somehow at fault. Like, ‘Well it’s their fault. Maybe they got into debt or whatever, and they chose to be a prostitute.’ Or, ‘Well, being a prostitute’s the lifestyle they chose.’ They never chose this. I’m not saying there not prostitutes in the world who have chosen it. But girls living in brothels, who are victims, there’s no way they’ve chosen this.
The second misconception is that they stay there by choice because they’re not shackled in any way. So it’s, ‘Well, why don’t they just escape? Why don’t they go get help? Why don’t they try to make their lives better and get out of there?’ The answer is — they can’t. Because we don’t, most people don’t understand what fear can do to a person. I mean, if you’re 4 years old, and I steal you from your family — I tell your family some story about, ‘Oh, I’m gonna give you an education or whatever, and take you into the city with me…’
Once we get there, I sell you into a brothel, and then say ‘If you ever try to escape, you’re going to be arrested because you’re now a criminal. You’ll go to jail. Your parents will go to jail because they willingly let you come and do this. If you try and go back to your parents, they’re going to hate you because of what you now are.’ I mean, you are completely imprisoned. It’s just not in a physical sense. So I think that’s another big misconception that there’s something they can do about it.
And I think the third one is that there’s nothing we can do. I hear that a lot. ‘But, there’s nothing I can do about it.’ False. No, not everyone is going to go raid brothels with International Justice Mission. Not everyone is going to be traveling overseas and doing that. But newsflash: Human trafficking is in America, too. It’s no excuse to not educate yourself; to educate yourself, educate your community.
There’s a fabulous group down in Orange County out of Vanguard University. They go around to the free clinics, where they speak languages other than English a lot of the time. A pimp will hardly ever take one of his girls to a hospital if she gets sick, because the authorities might become involved. But they will take them to these free clinics where they’ll probably never see the same doctor twice, they don’t all speak English, so it’s not a huge risk. This group will go into those kind of clinics and train the staff to recognize signs of human trafficking, so they know what to look for.
D: Do you know the name of the group?
H: Sandy Morgan leads it. She’s the administrator of the Orange County Task Force for Human Trafficking. And she is also, I think, the director of women’s studies at Vanguard University. She coordinates a lot through the university and has her students go out and do a lot of this stuff.
D: Before talking to you, one of my misconceptions was the size of the problem in the United States.
H: Mine too. I would have said, ‘Well, that happens overseas.’ But that’s not true. And also, where you put your money — into the clothes you buy, the food, the products. Pay attention. Do the companies use trafficked persons? Because, human trafficking is more than sex trafficking. There’s slave labor, forced labor, bondage. I’m ashamed to even go through my closet and see that most of the stuff that I own is probably made by a slave.
I just read the latest watch-list and found out IKEA is horrendous for their use of slaves. IKEA and Hollister, and I forget the others that were on top, but I was just like, ‘Oh, gosh.’ And people are generally becoming aware of free trade coffee.
D: Right.
H: That’s kind of becoming a trendy thing. But we don’t realize the scope of it and how much of it is used, how much [clothing] is produced using slave labor. I mean, you see a nice blazer in a store, probably cost, like 60 bucks. And you’d probably think, ‘Hey, good quality, name brand, that’s a decent price. 60 bucks.’ The woman in Bolivia who produced that, probably gets paid a dollar per coat she produces and it probably takes her two days to make the coat.
D: And that dollar for the two days is all she gets?
H: That’s all she gets, and probably, she has three kids. I’m totally making up this scenario, but…
D: But it’s almost like a statistically proven hypothetical.
H: Yeah.
D: I think hearing even just a little bit of this, it’s easy to get the feeling of ‘Oh, there’s so much…again, it seems so impossible to…’
H: It’s so big, I can’t do anything.
D: Right. So where did you get the inspiration to keep going?
H: In truth, I’m still a newbie in this field. There’re people who’ve been doing this a lot longer and who know a lot more than I do.
D: Sure, but to actually say, ‘Yes, I’m going to go on this trip…’
H: Yes. The more closely I come into contact with who God is, and what God’s desire is for all of His creation, for each individual human being, the more sickened I am by things that are happening to these people. Every single person is created in the image of God. I have the image of God, you have the image of God, each person has the image of God. But also, collectively as humanity, we bear the image of God. I don’t think we fully understand what it does to us when that image is stomped on, even if it’s not personally stomped on in me. It effects us all.
D: It’s like a dedication to the image of God and to prize the image of God in other people.
H: I really truly believe we are marring and distorting something beyond what we can measure and we don’t understand the cost. We really don’t understand the cost.
When we ignore, or fail to fully understand what it means to bear the image, I mean the imago dei, the image of God within us is part of what helps us understand who God is. So if we’re not in touch with God, if we’re trampling on it, then of course we’re going to have a misunderstanding of God.
D: So what have you done in so far as preparing for this trip?
H: I found I don’t really know how to prepare. I mean I sit down and get out my journal and pray be like, ‘Okay God, how do I emotionally prepare for this?’ And then I would realize what I just said and say, ‘How do you emotionally prepare yourself to see a 4 year old child rescued from a brothel?’ I think that should shock and horrify me. I don’t think I should be prepared for that. So, beyond making sure I have bug spray and everything, I don’t know what other preparations to make.
I know I’m going into something I’m not fully prepared for, but in many ways, I think it’s good that I’m unprepared. Because I think to go and see that, I mean I don’t know what I’ll feel like after this.
For more information concerning WorldHope, please visit www.worldhope.org. For more information concerning International Justice Mission, please visit www.ijm.org.
Dominic Laing is a writer, director, editor, and anything else. He lives in Pasadena, Calif. For more of his writing, please visit www.dominiclaing.com
