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On our visit to a hill tribe village in the mountains surrounding Chiang Mai, one house stood out from the rest. Elaborately carved in teak, with a shiny new pickup truck parked in front, it towered over its muddy, dilapidated neighbors. The owners of this house, the village chief explained, had sold their two daughters to a sex trafficker. The family renovated their home and the girls were never heard from again.
On another outing, we stopped for coffee at a roadside cafe where the proprietor--a gregarious middle-aged man--happened to speak English. Without prompting, he began telling us how he and his wife had tried for years to conceive, and just when they were about to give up, she became pregnant with a baby girl. While his wife finished blending our mochas, he gushed about their daughter as if she were a Fulbright Scholar (she's five). "You should hear her pronunciation," he said, imitating a British accent. "It's better than mine!"
