No successful movement or organisation is without its challenges and setbacks. These setbacks were indeed plentiful in the early stages of Chab Dai’s formation, and stalled the founding group of small organisations’ joint proposal for over six months.

After a number of roadblocks and disappointments, our founder Helen Sworn had a dream about continuing with the coalition, and approached the group of small organisations again. “We couldn’t directly fund any of the small organisations, but what we said we’d do was focus on training, resources, advocacy and development of a coalition. It was difficult telling the small organisations we couldn’t fund them, but they still expressed interest in what we were planning to do”.

The context of Chab Dai’s origins is fascinating and extensive, dating back to 1999, when there were a just “a few faith based organisations and some other UN lead agencies who first saw the emergence of human trafficking”. Human trafficking was indeed an issue that was just coming to light, and few organisations had tangible knowledge on the phenomenon.

“The early responders were those already on the ground who were doing related work but not direct work”, something that illustrates how interconnectedness with other social issues is a core element of trafficking. Helen was one of these early responders, first coming across the phenomenon while working on a baseline research with a team in Poipet, on the Thai/Cambodia border, with children who had been deported from Thailand.

Charlie Dittmeier estimates that there’s around 51,000 profoundly deaf people living in Cambodia. “And we’ve worked with only around 2,000 of those since we started in 1997,” he says.

Charlie works for the Deaf Development Programme here in Cambodia, run by global Catholic mission organisation, Maryknoll. They educate over-16s and young adults, teach them Cambodian sign language, give them vocational training, keep a registry for the deaf and perhaps most importantly of all, help them to feel part of a community.

The problem is, there isn’t really such a thing as a deaf community in Cambodia. Often those still out there on their own won’t know what’s happened to them, why they can’t communicate with others, or that there are others just like them.