It's nearly 10pm and Umida* is cooking dinner - a simple meal of rice and meat for the 11 members of her household who have been stuck inside the house all day due to Uzbekistan's intense summer heat.
Since emerging as an independent nation in 1991, after nearly 200 years of Russian and then Soviet rule,
Uzbekistan has slowly seen some economic progress. But poverty and
unemployment remain high and many Uzbeks travel abroad for work. This leaves the men, women and children vulnerable to
forced labour and sex trafficking.
"My older sister works in a hospital in Moscow, so I look after her children," Umida says. "She's the only one who understands what happened to me in Bangkok, I have told nobody else."
Born into a large, impoverished family, the 36-year-old says life was difficult growing up. Her mother died in 2000, leaving her father, a builder, to care for his four children. "It was hard without my mother," she recalls, "the families in my town with two parents had more money."
When she was 28 years old, Umida says she met a local Uzbek woman who promised her profitable work in
Thailand.
Umida doesn't say whether she knew the specific nature of this work, but explains that with the hope of providing for her son who was then six years old, she agreed to travel to the Thai capital, Bangkok.
But, when she arrived in Thailand, she realised that she had been deceived. The woman who had made the arrangements destroyed all of her documents. "She was a very bad lady. She gave me no food, no money. I could only go outside to work every day," Umida says quietly. The woman forced her to work as a prostitute on the streets of Bangkok.
Trafficked for sex
Many downtown Bangkok streets are lined with women, shifting from one foot to the other, whispering to passers-by, hoping to attract their next customer. Statistics from the Thai Ministry of Public Health and from NGOs indicate that there are more than 120,000 people working in the Thai sex industry.
