Vietnam has a huge problem involving traffickers that approach poor communities and offer work and board for young children in Ho Chi Minh City factories, typically clothing sweatshops. They lie to the parents that the children will be cared for and receive vocational training, good lodging, and a small wage. In practice, however, the children are exploited, receive inferior food, sleep 15 to a room, and rarely have free time to go outside. The children know no better and can be as young as eight. They perform menial jobs such as cutting and sewing clothes and have no social life. It is a terrible situation.
In the early 2010s, the traffickers targeted poor fishing villages near Hue. Blue Dragon knew the only solution was to educate and warn parents not to be duped by the traffickers. To that end, Blue Dragon established a health centre in conjunction with the Vietnam Red Cross Foundation, which provided free health care and warnings and notices about the risk of trafficking. Blue Dragon community workers visited villages and warned parents to be on the lookout for the traffickers. The work proved so successful that the traffickers no longer targeted fishing villages near Hue and instead headed up to the border with Laos , near Dien Bien Phu, to target impoverished hill-tribe communities who knew no better.
The traffickers then followed a similar pattern. They would promise work, training, food, and board, which was attractive to poor hill-tribe families. However, once again, instead of caring for the children, the traffickers forced them into cruel labour conditions, and the children suffered for it. Blue Dragon again worked with local authorities, this time to establish a number of kindergartens in the mountains, to gain the trust of local people and provide a way for them to warn local families of the perils of listening to the lies told to them by the traffickers. Once again, this effort proved successful, forcing the traffickers to move to Ha Giang, another remote region near the border with China.
