Remember Nhu (we are in Thailand!)

Remember Nhu

This is our contact for our month in Thailand. We are living on their property in Chiang Mai, building relationships with the girls who live in the home, and doing manual labor on the land while the girls are in school. Before I blog about the specifics of what day to day life is like, I want to share the vision of Remember Nhu’s ministry.

 

 

It’s estimated that one million children are trafficked into sexual slavery every year. That’s almost 2,700 children that are trafficked every single day.

Trafficked. To most of us, the word simply represents an ‘issue’ – just another to choose from in the marketplace of ideas. To the enslaved, it’s something infinitely more devastating. It means the end of childhood and the beginning of hell. It means ten to twenty men to service every night for years on end. It means every manner of sexually transmitted disease, while the body just falls apart under an abominable weight of abuse. It means the total destruction of a precious human soul.

Although solutions to the problem of child sex trafficking are as variant as the innumerable complexities surrounding the trade, Remember Nhu’s founders and partners have committed to a preventative approach. That is, the vast majority of our efforts are directed at keeping at-risk children from ever being sold into the hell of sexual slavery.

Remember Nhu was conceived in 2003-2004 by Carl Ralston of Akron, Ohio. In November 2003, Ralston was attending a conference hosted by the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Cambodia when he was made aware of the horrific problem of child sex trafficking. The missionary speaker told of Nhu, a 12-year-old girl who had committed her life to Jesus Christ, was baptized, grew as a Christian, and began to share publicly her faith. However, a family member then sold her virginity, partly as an act of disapproval of Nhu’s conversion to Christ. At that time, the missionary did not know what had become of Nhu. Ralston felt inspired by God to “Remember Nhu� and in December of 2003 committed to God that he would do everything in his power to eliminate the use of children in the sex trade industry around the world.

In 2004, Ralston finished a master’s degree in Religion in which his final project created Remember Nhu: a ministry that would prevent children from entering the sex trade by meeting the physical, emotional, education, and spiritual needs of potential victims.