How much money are you worth? How much are your sister, mother, aunt, or daughter worth? In Vietnam, and all over Southeast Asia, women and children are being bought and sold for as low as $100.

I am Vietnamese American. I was born in a small town at the very bottom of Vietnam-near Cambodia. I was adopted, but nevertheless, I’m Vietnamese. When I was 11, my family joined an organization called the Catalyst Foundation.

This group is a humanitarian organization that creates community programs which provides basic needs, job opportunities, counseling, and education to prevent abductions, specifically to the young women and children of Vietnam. Through this group, I was taught of one of the largest illegal trades in the world: Human trafficking. (For those who don’t know, human trafficking is the illegal movement of people, typically for the purposes of forced labor or commercial sexual exploitation.)

Because I am obviously of the given nationality (Vietnamese), I am going to focus mainly on my homeland and its relationship with this terrible, black market business:

In 2011, the Vietnamese government approved the “National Plan of Action against Human Trafficking” for the period of 2011-2015. The overall objective of this plan was to significantly increase awareness in society of preventing and combating human trafficking. The United Nations estimates that 700,000 to 4 million women and children are trafficked around the world for purposes of forced prostitution, labor, and other forms of exploitation every year. Trafficking is estimated to be a $7-billion-dollar annual business and eighty percent of human trafficking victims are women. In developing countries such as Vietnam, women and girls are rented out for sex for as little as 15 minutes at a time, dozens of times a day.

In Vietnam, as well as the rest of many parts of the world, you may see a little pocket shop in which you may get your hair cut or phone fixed. In the back of these shops there are brothels and rooms where girls are continuously raped day by day as they are pushed through the trafficking market. These girls are broken and scarred for life, and no one immediate is capable of helping them. The Catalyst Foundation, as well as other trafficking combatting organizations are in the process of educating girls to not be lured, teaching them signals and signs of a potential abduction. These girls are taught to stay with their community and even in some fortunate cases given cell phones to use if placed in a bad location or situation.

I could have been one of those girls, but my fate was different. I was adopted. A month or two after I was brought to the States, pneumonia hit my orphanage. Many of the small children became very ill and a few infants died. If I had stayed, I more than likely would have gotten sick, and possibly would not have made it. If I had not passed away, I would have been put onto the streets around the age of 12 to work in a factory, earning no money, making your Nike Air’s and Abercrombie & Fitch shirts. Had the odds been even more against me, I would have gone directly into prostitution, as in, the sex trade. Luckily, none of that happened. I am here and blessed to be so privileged with a very comfortable lifestyle and a large, loving family, along with many friends. Never once have I wished that I had not been adopted.

Learning about human trafficking and how it could have affected me personally changed my life. It helped me realize that I take everything for granted and that I do have full control over myself and what I do. I am so very lucky to be educated and to be part of such an organization who goes out to educated potential victims and creates happier and safer lives for hundreds of girls living in slums.

When I am older, I envision dedicating a portion of my life to giving back to the women and children of my homeland. I want to help them to understand them that their worth and value is not measured in currency, so keep spreading love and education with me, so we can better this world we all share.