6 minute read
BOLD VISIONARY
FREE SPIRIT
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WORDS LINDA READ PHOTOS LISA PEARL
WHEN FORMER PRIMARY school teacher and Sunshine Coast resident Nicky Mih read a book 12 years ago about the sex traffi cking industry in Cambodia, it set her life on a course she could never have imagined.
Today, as the founder of not-for-profi t child protection organisation Free To Shine, Nicky leads a team of 18 education offi cers and social workers to prevent the traffi cking of vulnerable girls by getting them into school. She is also in high demand in the business community as a public speaker, and has written her own book – Do What Matters – about the lessons of life and leadership she has learnt during her extraordinary career.
To date, Nicky’s mission with Free To Shine has resulted in securing the safety and education of 754 girls from 59 rural villages in Cambodia. But she has no intention of stopping there.
The book that started it all was The Road of Lost Innocence by Somaly Mam, a teenage girl in Cambodia who was sold to a brothel. It was a turning point for Nicky, who says she had always felt compelled to help vulnerable women but hadn’t known how.
“I had read a whole bunch of books about the plight of women and girls in different countries around the world,” says Nicky, who is originally from England.
“Stories from women who were gang-raped for punishment for a crime [they had not] committed but for a crime that a family member had allegedly committed; to a 10-year-old who walks into a courtroom and asks them that they help her get divorced, for example.
“I was so upset these things were happening; I hated that those things happened and I wanted to help but I didn’t know how. So, every time I’d read a book I’d put it on my bookcase and then I’d just go about my life as usual. It was just niggling under the surface and really bugging me and I thought ‘I can’t keep reading these books and not doing anything about it’.
“So I made a quiet little promise some time, when I was hanging the washing out, that the next book I read, no matter what the issue, what the country, I was going to do something. A few months later I found that the next book I was reading was a book about sex traffi cking in Cambodia and I remembered that promise.
“I knew it was time for me to step up.”
What followed was a one-month stint as a volunteer with an organisation in Cambodia that helped survivors of traffi cking. At the end of that month, Nicky asked the organisation how she could help if she got a group of people together back on the Sunshine Coast.
“It was only then I learnt that the day those girls got
rescued, the traffi ckers didn’t go without a girl, they just went out to a rural village and took a new young girl,” she says.
“So they said to me, ‘Nicky, go out to the rural villages, fi nd the girls who aren’t in school, and get them into school’. And as I looked around the room, the survivors were shaking their heads. Not one of them had been in school when they were traffi cked.”
Nicky had “no idea whatsoever” how to go about such a task, so she spent 18 months researching and liaising with dozens of organisations. While she found many groups helping girls who had been traffi cked – rescuing them, providing them with safe houses, and prosecuting criminals – there were none that specifi cally targeted education as a preventative method.
“I couldn’t fi nd an organisation that was out in the rural villages, specifi cally identifying the girls before the traffi ckers did,” she says. “So that’s what we ended up doing. And instead of helping another organisation, which is what I had planned to do, in order to deliver on my promise I had to set it up.”
Free To Shine has three broad objectives that aim to keep girls safe: fi rstly, creating safe communities by teaching families how to protect themselves and prioritise the safety of their children; secondly, providing access for girls to education – while they are in the classroom, they are safe and under the watchful eye of a professional; and thirdly, encouraging women in leadership by modelling gender equity, providing leadership training for young women, and funding university places.
While getting girls into school has proved to be a huge success for Free To Shine, there are always many complex social and economic issues throwing roadblocks in the way.
“Those roadblocks come when a family living in poverty, battling things like poverty, illness, unemployment, migration, family violence – they’d have no food, or no place to stay, or they’d get sick from drinking dirty water – and that’s when the girls would drop out of school in order to go to work and help the family, and that’s when traffi ckers would target them. So that’s the second goal – getting the girls into school, but more importantly, keeping them there.”
Given the huge challenges of running such an organisation, it’s not surprising that Nicky has learnt more than a few life lessons, which is why her public speaking engagement calendar is full. She believes these lessons can be applied to many aspects of life.
One of the most important of those lessons is that the education is a two-way street – while Free To Shine may be helping to provide girls in Cambodia with formal education, the Cambodian families are offering something immensely valuable – albeit less tangible – in return.
“We could learn an equal amount from them,” Nicky says. “We can provide education for them to go to state school, but there are things that we do not get right here that they do get right there. I think that they’ve got a wisdom and an approach to life that people here fi nd really valuable.
“It gives that kind of strength and perspective and inspiration to people. The girls inspire me, for sure. That’s where I get my strength from.”
To find out more about Free To Shine go to freetoshine.org For more information about Nicky Mih and her book, Do What Matters, go to nickymih.com
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