More about Mam Somaly
source: http://sofiasroyalsweden.blogspot.com/2008/04/queen-silvia-honoured-childrens-world.htmlource:
Sunday, 20 April 2008
Queen Silvia honoured children's world heroes
This past Friday at Gripsholm Castle in Mariefred, a quaint town located beside Lake Mälaren in the Strängnäs municipality in Södermanland County, the Queen attended the annual prize awarding ceremony of The World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child (WCPRC). The Swedish non-profit organisation Children's World, founded in 1979 (the UN Year of the Child) and based upon the UN Child Convention, founded the three prizes in 2000 which are awarded during a special ceremony with royal presence at Gripsholm Castle every year.
This year The World's Children's Prize, selected by a jury of children from 17 different countries, went to Somaly Mam of Cambodia. The second prize, the Global Friends' Award, which was decided upon in a global vote cast by 6, 593 335 children from around the world, also went to Somaly Mam. The third prize, The World's Children's Honorary Award, went to Agnes Stevens of the USA and Josefina Condori of Peru. The award ceremony offered dance and music from South Africa, Vietnam and Sweden, all in the presence of the award winners, the children's jury, invited guests and of course Her Majesty the Queen.
Josefina Condori has for more than 15 years been fighting for girls who work as maids in the city of Cusco in Peru, often in slave like conditions, after becoming a maid herself and separated from her family at the tender age of 7. Agnes Stevens devotes her life to helping homeless children in her country. At the time there are more than a million of them and Agnes helps her share by running School on Wheels which provides education, food, housing and love.
Somaly Mam from Cambodia, the evening's two-time award winner, has for the past 12 years devoted her life to saving girls who are sold as sex slaves to brothels and instead give them love, rehabilitation and education. Somaly was born into the small minority of phnong in the poorer south east parts of Cambodia in 1970, conditions were hard and at the age of only twelve she was sold to a local tradesman and later sold again as a sex slave to a brothel. If conditions had been hard growing up, her life became a nightmare at the brothel and Somaly had to suffer regular abuse and torture, and was regularly locked up. In the early 1990's she was rescued as she received help to escape from a French aid worker and received $ 3,000 from a male client which she used to buy all the girls at her brothel their freedom back. Ever since that day she has made the fight against the sex slave industry her life's mission and calling.
Through her non-profit NGO organisation AFESIP (Agir pour les Femmes en Situation Précaire or Acting for Women in Distressing Situations), founded in 1997, Somaly and her husband work together with the police in Cambodia and several south east Asian countries to rescue, help and protect sex slaves, prostitutes, women and children from their work, rapes and torture. In 2007 she founded the USA based The Somaly Mam Foundation, a registered non-profit that aims at spreading global awareness and funding organisations that works against sex slavery and helps its victims.
Despite her status as something of a celebrity and one of the most well-known NGO activists in the world, all the prizes she has received (The Prince of Asturias Award 1998, Glamour Woman of the Year 2006), being a flag bearer in the 2006 Olympic Games in Torino and sitting on Tyra Banks' talk show sofa - Somaly will always carry her past with her.
- People thing I'm strong but I'm not. Inside I feel just as weak as the girls that we rescue, that cut themselves out of hatred for their bodies, she told Svenska Dagbladet in an interview this week.
The price she pays for her work can also be high. Somaly lives under constant death threats and two years ago the threats on her family became a real nightmare when her teenage daughter was kidnapped, drugged, raped and sold to a brothel neat the borders to Thailand But when she was found and re-united with her mom, Champa was the one who urged her to continue the fight:
- Mom, I have you all will be alright. But what will happen to all those other girls if you quit? she told Somaly.
So even if it sometimes feels hopeless for her, with corrupt officials who more or less supports the sex industry, repeated broken promises and the constant flow of new girls being sold to brothels, Somaly is not giving up. She has a mission for life.
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