Daughters New Visitor Centre!

At last, I can proudly announce the successful opening of our own new visitor centre. This is a beautiful space housing several Daughters' businesses, to which the public can come and learn about our work, be educated about the issues and realities of sex trafficking in Cambodia and support Daughters through the many customer opportunities (shop, women's spa and top floor cafe). It is located on st 178 (art street), opposite the University of Fine Arts' new art gallery. We employ around 14 girls here, some of whom are training as managers and other positions of responsibility.

The cafe, called Sugar 'n Spice, opened mid-June and has had a steady stream of customers who have been giving great feedback. We could not have done this without the skills of our kiwi Chef, Rich, whose amazing culinary talents have meant a fantastic menu and 3 highly skilled trainee chefs. The cafe is intended as a place for vocational training, where new clients will train and then graduate to work in top end restaurants and hotels. We offer comfy sofas, free wifi, delicious coffee, original smoothies which are fast becoming famous along with our outstanding brownie, light lunches, desserts and homebaked treats. All at unbeatable prices! It is not surprising our customers keep coming back.

Customer feedback so far includes; 'We really enjoyed our visit, the food was great and served in good portions. What an inspiring business - the slide show was very moving, and presented the trafficking situation well. Thankyou and good luck to all the girls'; 'The food and service at the cafe was wonderful! I definately would love to come back soon'; 'What a gorgous place - I could stay and browse in the shop for ages. Beautiful food and super service in the cafe' (Australia); and 'Service was gracious and efficient, the environment & setting is beautiful. I will be telling all I know to come here' (UK).

The shop sells the beautiful products made in the Sewing Room. Many of our products are made with eco-friendly naturally dyed cotton in earth tones, and includes accessories (jewellery, bags, scarves etc), clothing, and home furnishings. Jewellery is made on site and you can watch this being produced en route to the women's spa and visitor exhibitions. The women's spa specialises in head, shoulder and face massage, along with hand and food treatments including massage and pedicures/manicures. A registered Canadian massage therapist trained the girls, and as a result they have highly professional skills.

The visitor exhibitions include information boards scattered around the building, along with a slide show presentation in our dedicated presentation room, which gives insight into the issues and problems faced by victims of trafficking, and the solutions Daughters is able to offer.

We are very blessed to have this beautiful new centre, and thankful to everybody who has participated in making it possible, including donors and volunteers, and the girls themselves who are the true stars :)

We now have Sons!

Earlier this year we started a new program working with ‘ladyboys’, male transsexual sex workers known in Cambodia as '3rd sex'. They are a completely unreached and highly ostracised population in Cambodia. Generally they only come out after midnight, due to the blatant social discrimination they face, which at the very least includes insults hurled at them from passers by if they venture outside in daylight hours. We conducted outreaches with these boys in the early part of 2010, and as a result started Sons project. We invited these boys to join Sons if they wanted to end sex work and earn alternative income. Thanks to a partnering business from Europe, we were able to offer them jobs making hand-made leather buttons, and have since added another small business to this project, silk screen printing. Their attendance has fluctuated, with a high attrition rate, but also a number of steady participants throughout, who have begun implementing huge life changes. The boys have been attending creative and educational programs, including music classes (we have a plan to form a worship band with them in the future) and literacy classes. We have had wonderful male volunteers working with the boys to show friendship and loving care, and the boys have chosen to attend our Friday church where most of them have become Christians. Two of the boys who became Christians a few weeks ago have made the decision to take on male identity once again, and end their promiscuous lifestyles, as they seek to follow Jesus. We are very blessed by them and thankful to the volunteers who have impacted them so much with friendship and unconditional love and acceptance. We see God is at work in their lives in a beautiful way and give him the Glory for this.

Take a look at all our hard work!

At last, the news we have all been awaiting! We have opened our beautiful Daughters of Cambodia shop - phase I of the Daughters Visitor Centre - on March 25th 2010. It has taken 5 months to complete the renovations (should have taken 2 months max, but hey, this is Cambodia). It looks stunning, and we are thrilled with it. Until now, the products we make at Daughters have been exported overseas to wholesale buyers in Australia, the USA, and the UK, but since March 25th these beautiful products are available for the first time in our very own shop. The address is street 178, house 65eo, on the opposite side to the national museum and one block towards Street 19.

The products are made at Daughters centre by our clients - girls we have had the privilege of setting free from the sex industry, and empowering to change their lives. We offer the girls a job in our Fair Trade businesses, primarily The Sewing Room, where we produce gorgeous clothing, fashion accessories and home furnishings. We have at least 60 girls at any one time working with us, and they are my heroes - their courage, their resilience, their ability to take hold of new skills and learn to transform their own lives. From the pit to empowerment, hope, joy, life to the full.

I digress (I cannot help but get excited when I talk about the girls). Back to our shop. The location, it transpires, is divinely inspired; there is little comparable competition on st178 but many tourists and visitors. We are greatly enjoying the experience of doing business with the general public, learning what they like and which products are our best sellers. We had some great advice from Bonnie in that regard (thanks Bonnie, you are right about tops being high on the list!). Most of all we are enjoying having the opportunity to tell people about the work of Daughters and the issues of sex trafficking in Cambodia. Many people, amazingly, do not realize either the existence, or extent of, the problem.

So, sales have been going well and we are working hard on Phase II - the visitor exhibition rooms, the spa, and the Tea Rooms. I use the term 'Tea Rooms' because I am English, but in more cosmopolitan terms it is a Cafe, where we will serve light lunches (salads, sandwiches), a few main courses, lots of home baked goodies (try our brownie, it is the best Phnom Penh has on offer), great coffee, fresh teas using local flavours, delicious desserts (the best pavlova you have ever tasted, outside New Zealand of course), and some original smoothies you will write home about, believe me. The Cafe, which is named Sugar 'n Spice, will hopefully open mid-May. 7am-5.30pm, Monday - Saturday.

The Visitor Exhibition Rooms should be open by the end of April. These are a first in Cambodia, and an opportunity for the public to learn about sex trafficking and to read some of the personal reflections of the girls who have survived, and now thrive, at Daughters. The women's Spa will open at the same time as the visitor centre. The staff and clients involved in the new Spa voted recently about whether the Spa should be for women only. The vote was unanimously in favour. We believe in ownership, empowerment and choice at Daughters.

A word (or several) of thanks to a large number of volunteers for their great endeavours in this project:
• the designers (products and shop); Abbey, Olivia, Jennifer
• the marketing/graphics experts; Lisa, Liz, Lee Anne, Caroline
• skills trainers; Richard, Lois, Olivia, Bonnie, Henk, Maryke, Esther, Lene, Ruth from NZ
• exhibition information & research; Jenny, Sadie, Elisabeth
• photography exhibitions; Jaymie Friesen, Jeremy Maz
• the builders especially Samuel, Pete & Sharon for their sweat blood & toil. Well, hopefully not blood.

A word of thanks also to our donors, The Ratanak Fdn UK and Billy Graham Evangelistic Assoc for making this possible.

Daughters Shop

We are in the exciting preparation stages for opening our new store in downtown Phnom Penh. It is in an old French building on the Art Street (St178, opposite the National Museum), and has space inside for several outlets in the one store. A team of Cambodian builders have been renovating the premises, along with Pete from New Zealand. The ground floor will house the shop selling Daughters products, along with a women’s spa. Exhibition rooms will be situated on the next floor up, with a tea shop on the top floor. There are a number of purposes: it will be an outlet for Daughters products and businesses to generate sales locally; it will provide jobs to around 12 Daughters clients; it will also serve as an educational venue where the general public will have an opportunity to more about the situation regarding the sex industry in Cambodia in addition to supporting the work of Daughters.

We are thankful to have the amazing skills of Richard, a chef from New Zealand, who has been training the girls in cooking skills, and also an interior designer recently arrived, Jennifer from the USA, who is styling the store. We are thankful to many other volunteers at Daughters who are all very busy helping with the many preparations, including; customer service classes, English classes, spa skills training, graphic design and marketing, product design, screen printing techniques, and many more. In addition, we are blessed to have had a clothing designer, Olivia from Australia, who has designed a range of clothing for our new shop. Olivia has taught design classes each day in order to pass on her skills, both for sustaining Daughters design department and also to empower girls with skills for their own future businesses

We in the final preparation stages and are anticipating opening mid-March. Watch this space for more...

Exit Strategy

We have been developing our exit strategy at Daughters, for girls who have been with us for 2 years or more. Our desire has always been that girls are able to graduate Daughters and live sustainable independent lives. Three girls entered our exit program in January 2010. These girls had been at Daughters for more than 2 years; they were reluctant and nervous about leaving. We arranged for them to buy sewing machines and over-lockers through a partnering micro-finance organization, and they started their own small businesses at home. The scheme is proving very successful so far. They have been taking in piecework from Daughters and producing high quality work much faster, as a result of which they have earned double what they had been earning at Daughters. We are currently creating a support structure for providing various other support structures that will help them be successful, including a social worker to visit weekly and business advice and support. These girls are able to attend the other programs at Daughters, including church, medical and counselling clinics and educational programs.

This scheme is in the early stages, but is considered so successful by the other girls that some have requested to buy sewing machines to work in their own homes, so we are expanding this program.

Meet The Team

Daughters is growing from strength to strength and striving for professionalism in what we do. The success we are seeing is due in a very large way to our amazing staff and volunteers. So I wanted to briefly mention them all here in order to acknowledge their hugely valuable contribution and to thank them.

Currently we have 13 staff and 10 foreign volunteers. They are as follows:

Danet, Medical assistant & counsellor, who works very hard and is very flexible
Sam Nieng, centre manager who is also a great counsellor
Phillip, machine technician, whose skills make him indispensableHeang, guard & driver, who is a very safe male to have at Daughters.
Socheata, business manager, & newly promoted to marketing manager, who is a great advocate on behalf of the girls
Kolab, Director's assistant, who is a pastor's daughter and has been with us since we started in 2007
Pich, a former client who works in the daycare program & is shortly to be trained as a cousellor
Touch, our daycare leader, a gentle older lady
Lois from Canada whose skills in organizational development are also invaluable (in addition to baking!)
Elisabeth from Switzerland, who is a skilled counsellor & speaks amazing Khmer
Joanna from New Zealand who is our midwife, artist and worship leader (she is multi-talented)
Jen from USA, our admin assistant, whose skills we value highly
Rika from Indonesia, who is our valued accountant
Casey from the USA, who is our centre nurse and runs the clinic very competently
Phyllis from Canada who leads the silk screen printing program & is highly creative
Akia who is our housekeeper and keeps the centre clean
Sovannary who is our new bookkeeper, currently learning the ropes
Olivia from Australia, who is our designer and is doing an amazing job
Chenda, assistant manager in The Sewing Room
Carole from France who is our Art Therapist and is highly creative
Jenny from Switzerland who is our admin assistant and researcher
Aimee from USA, who is our new daycare consultant and is doing a fantastic job
Ruth (me!) Founder & CEO, a psychologist from the UK who has worked with victims of trafficking in Cambodia since early 2004

Thank you to all of these hard-working, flexible, committed staff and volunteers. They are a great team and very valued. Thank you equally to all the volunteers who have worked with us in the past before returning to their own countries. We have been so blessed by all of you, your work has enabled many many girls to escape the sex industry and find a new life of dignity and hope :)

Reviewing things...

How effective are we???

I have been reviewing and evaluating how effective we are in achieving our goal of creating sustainable life changes in the lives of the girls we work with. We want to make a real and lasting difference to their lives, not just crunch numbers, and for this reason we have created a few assessment tools which we have been using during 2009. These have been very useful in assessing which areas we are doing well in and where there are gaps or things we need to improve. We are striving for excellence!

1. Quality of life assessment: measures the extent to which life-styles changes have been implemented, changes in psychological symptoms, social functioning and behaviours in the lives of each girl (quantitative & qualitative).
2. Client feedback survey: measures the effectiveness of each program in achieving these outcomes (quantitative & qualitative)
3. Statistics (quantitative)

Assessment findings show us the following (averages):


100% of girls stop selling their bodies after joining Daughters
Alcohol consumption ceases by average 87%
75% reduction in experiencing domestic violence
75% improvement in dysfunctional domestic relationships
65% improvement in health and physical wellbeing
87% reduction in risk taking behaviours
50% improvement in spending habits/money management
50% reduction in anxiety symptoms
70% reduction in depression symptoms
70% increase in self-esteem and self-worth
91% reduction in suidical thoughts
56% reduction in somatic symptoms (headaches, stomachaches etc)
62% increase in sense of hope for the future

Which programs are most effective?

80% of girls rate the church program as the one which has helped them experience the most healing, even girls who are still Buddhist
The small businesses, and medical clinic were rated by 80% of girls as being the most important programs
60% of girls rate the life-skills workshops as having given them skills to change their behaviours and life-styles
Other aspects at Daughters that have created life-style changes: new friendships (20% of girls), the staff (20%), parties & games (40%), the creative classes (60%), counselling (80%)

When asked about future plans, many girls said they wanted to stay at Daughters forever (flattering, but not ultimate goal for them!)

Programs requested for the future:
English literacy (50%), Khmer literacy (35%), hair & beauty class (20%)

Statistics show:

Within the last 12 months, 100 girls have joined Daughters.
58 currently work at Daughters
Of those who have left, around 10 have entered job placements that we have referred them to (5%).
Around 10 have found alternative jobs for themselves, or set up their own small businesses (5%).
A large number of girls have returned to live with their families in the province and not returned to the sex industry
4 or 5 girls have returned to the sex industry that we know of (2%)
24 clients (almost half the total number) a week are treated in the medical clinic, plus 9 external referrals
20% of clients each week receive counselling


What these findings mean:

A large number of girls are escaping the sex industry through the work of Daughters (on average 100 per year)

we are being effective in enabling them to change their lives in sustainable ways (evidenced from high % changes in quality of life assessment)

Most girls who exit Daughters do not return to the sex industry (estimate just 2% return that we know of)

Strengths include the skilled business volunteers we now have working with us, to develop the organization in important areas, particularly the businesses and the organizational strategic planning. As a result, professional standards are being achieved in the businesses, and salaries of girls are beginning to be covered, moving us towards goal of self-sustainability

Other strengths include the range of creative activities and workshops, delivered by great long term and short term volunteers, such as the professional art therapist working with us at present.

Things to work on:

We are still understaffed for the growth that has occurred, running on the bare minimum due to lack of funds

The divide between the social support services and business model can create a dilemma for some staff as the interests conflict


These are very encouraging results! A huge thankyou to all the volunteers who have been working with us, and also to everyone who has donated. We are making a huge impact on the lives of many trafficked girls as a result, and this is priceless :)

end of July...

The team from Canada left on Friday, with a great party in the afternoon; the 50 clients we have plus 20 staff were all given a beautiful pearl and a pink rose by the team as symbols of their worth and beauty in God's eyes and ours too. The girls performed some beautiful dance pieces they had learned, and there was showcasing of the hair-do's the girls had learned in the hair-styling program. It was a fun and special afternoon. Many thanks to the team for all their hard work and dedication, they brought lots of fun, skills, learning opportunities and hope to the girls. Many girls mentioned the workshops on domestic violence as having been helpful, since this is an experience that is common to so many of them. They also liked the drug education and the budgeting workshops.

Next week it will be back to business and busyness as usual, with quite a number of orders to finish in The Sewing Room and some new customers to meet with. This business is growing steadily and beginning to generate income, and we find that work at Daughters is continually moving forward in exciting ways, changing and growing.

Client Testamony: Tokna

Tokna

“In the karaoke bar I welcomed customers standing in a line with other girls. The customers looked me up and down from my toes to my head, before deciding whether they would choose me. If a cutomer didn’t choose me, he would say and do derogatory things to me, such as throwing alcohol at my body. I saw many girls there being threatened with a gun or hit by customers, in order to force them to go to a guesthouse with the customer.

I felt like I was a game for the customer to play; when he needed me he took me to play, and when he didn’t need me he threw me away. I felt different to other people – I felt small. I was beautiful its true, but my value was small. Other people had education and a good life, with value. I felt life was too hard because I had no value. At night I used to sweat all over and experience intense fear and hyperventilate. I wanted to kill myself.

Since I started to work at Daughters these feelings have reversed; I know I have self-worth, and people don’t look down on me. I feel happy and valued. Before I earned a lot of money, and at Daughters I get less, but here no one looks down on me and I feel peace in my heart, nobody despises me.

I would like to help other sex workers to stop that life-style and change their lives, this is my plan. I want to be a counsellor.”

Introducing some of our overseas volunteers!

One of the strengths at Daughters are the wonderful volunteers and staff. Some of the new faces who joined us:

Sarah from England who worked as marketing consultant for us for 3 months, from April-June, and who masterminded the arts exhibitions, catalogue, and also taught art classes.

Cassie and Jen, both from the USA, who worked as admin assistants. Cassie returned home to get married, and Jen is having a break at home with her family for 2 months and will then return to Daughters.

Joanna from New Zealand who is our new midwife, who is here long-term and is taking wonderful care of our pregnant ‘daughters’ of whom there are currently 13.

Lee Anne who is our graphic designer (short term sadly!) and is responsible for some gorgeous new publicity material we now have. Lee Anne is currently re-designing our website.

Rika from Indonesia, our new accountant and marketing person, who has amazing skills and an amazing heart.

We welcome back Alta, our nurse practitioner from South Africa, who worked with us during 2007 and has now returned to fill in part time, whilst we look for a full-time nurse. We had a skilled Canadian nurse, Kim, working with us for a year, who has recently left and she is greatly missed.

We have had Jaymie, a photographer from Canada, working with us on our photography project which just ended in June. This was wonderfully successful.