She looked small for 13 and hid herself away in a cardigan worn like a cape. It was sticky in the room, even for January, a particularly damp month in the Philippines. She reached for my hand as she told her story, while Cecilia Oebanda-Pacis — the founder and director of this tucked-away refuge — translated from Tagalog as she spoke. We were sitting in a circle of 30 girls at a campus hidden high in the mountains. There were girls on either side of me as young as five, waiting to tell their stories. But Arianna, as we’ll call her, needed to speak first. Her past was practically punching its way out of her.
“Before I came here…when I was 11,” she began, “I had a baby from my grandfather…”
She wore a smile when she started — a willed expression of strength — and held it till she burst into sobs. I was listening on a time lag, waiting for translation; my jaw dropped when she said that last clause. The younger girls ducked their heads, but I couldn’t look away — Arianna was splitting open in front of me. Putting my hand on hers, I pulled her into a hug; she wept even harder in my arms. Like all the other girls here, she’d been removed from her family for the part they’d played in these girls’ abuse. Arianna, though, bore the extra weight of being parted from her own child. I wanted to weep with her, but that felt like an unearned right. So, I held her, damp-eyed, till she stopped sobbing.
This was four months ago, high up in the hills that rise north and east of Manila. I was just back, jet-lagged, after a high school semester in the U.S., and everything around me felt familiar but blurry, like the tip of a fever dream. The claustrophobic heat, the humidity in my nostrils, the mosquitoes that never stopped buzzing. I’d been invited to tour this refuge, called the Center of Hope, by my businessman father. For the last six years, our family have been major donors to its parent nonprofit, a firm called Voice of the Free.
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VF’s mission is to rescue as many girls as possible from the clutches of human traffickers in the Philippines. For decades, my country has been an open-air bazaar for the sexual exploitation of children. In 2021, the most recent year for which there’s data, more than 800,000 Filipinos were kidnapped by the gangs who dominate this trade in the South Pacific. Of the girls in that cohort, many were sold to brothels in Asia; others were shipped to pimps in Europe or married off to pedophiles abroad. But most of the girls in this refuge had survived a different kind of horror: They’d been sexually exploited by a family member as a means to support the household. Much of that abuse happened at home, online. There were girls in this circle who’d appeared on-camera, naked, from the age of one.
Writer Natalia Paradies with residents of the Center of Hope shelter
Courtesy Center of Hope
We met in a large room on the ground floor of a building that served as both school and dorm at Center of Hope. Joining us in the circle were the 12 adults who worked as full-time staffers. Several were teachers and therapists; others were nannies and housekeepers. The girls were deeply attached to them all, grabbing for their hands and sitting on their laps. But the older girls seemed to hang on Oebanda-Pacis, who founded Voice of the Free in 1991. (She opened this hilltop refuge in 2014; including her offices in other cities, it’s one of five facilities she runs now.) As the daughter of political dissidents who’d been jailed by the Marcos regime, she spent half her twenties in prison, giving birth to two children in captivity. (Her husband Ricardo was also an inmate at the prison.) Shortly after her release in 1990, she was approached by a mother whose daughter had gone missing in Manila. The girl “was trafficked from her province to work as a domestic” at age 12, says Oebanda-Pacis. “We found her in prison” — she’d been falsely accused of theft by her employer — “and got the police to release her.”
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In that unpaid act of mercy, Oebanda-Pacis found her calling. She recruited volunteers, many of them moms, to scour Manila’s parks for lost girls. They found more than they knew what to do with: The city was full of kids who’d been lured or kidnapped from the slums. “This was before [human] trafficking laws [in the Philippines],” says Oebanda-Pacis. “Girls [were] promised work and a good life in Manila [by traffickers],” then were forced into brothels and nightclubs.
She opened her first shelter in 1995, then shared her expertise with law enforcement. Over decades, she’s built partnerships with local cops and the federal Port Police. Working together, they’ve rescued tens of thousands of girls in the ports and cities of the Philippines. At one point, she was carrying 80 employees, and spending more time on admin than her mission. So, 11 years ago, she arranged a deal with law enforcement: They absorbed most of her staff so she could train her attention on this haven. Of the 25 women she currently employs, roughly half are former residents of Center of Hope.
Later that morning, the girls took me to see their rooms. My eyes fixed on the art above their beds. There were dazzling pinks and yellows in their paintings of the garden, and drawings of themselves playing tag with each other: a collective sense of sanctuary. But there were also, in some pictures, black skies and haunted forests. “Painting’s one of the ways our girls tell us that they’re hurting, before they can say it in words,” says Oebanda-Pacis. “It can take them a very long time to heal, especially for the ones with the worst trauma.”
Cecilia Oebanda-Pacis (front, third from right) founded the nonprofit Voice of the Free to help trafficking victims in 1991. “We know too well what these girls have been through,” she says.
Downstairs, someone played a pop tune for me: The girls had created a dance in my honor. I’m an awful dancer and a much worse singer, as my father loves to tease me about. But those girls were so joyous as they chanted the words that, after a moment, I joined in. There was something gorgeous in their voices, and defiant as well. They were singing their song of survival to me.
I COME FROM A LARGE family in Manila, the capital city of the Philippines. It’s so large, in fact, that for our family reunion last summer, we rented a resort on the island of Cebu — and 400 of us showed up for the weekend. My parents raised me and my two siblings in a secure enclave at Manila’s center; for years, I only ventured past its gates to visit relatives in a nearby villa. Thanks to that isolation, I had almost no sense of what life was like for most kids in my country. (A half hour from my house, on the outskirts of Manila, millions of children subsist in slums on less than a dollar a day.) Then, when I was 10, my parents enrolled me in a Christmas choir that they were underwriting. After the concert, my father sat me down and showed me photos of brick-block schools in the provinces. “You did something much bigger than you knew,” he said. “That concert you put on helps us build schools for poor kids who don’t have them.”
I was baffled – but quickly learned about my family’s commitment to public service. For instance, our extended tribe owned solar power firms, and donated thousands of panels every year to poor communities with scarce utilities. Our family also owned a bank in Manila; it funded nonprofits that helped feed poor families and helped finance the construction of those schools. All this was news to me. My father went to work at a brewery each day in a pair of jeans and a work shirt. (I’d later learn that he founded the brewery.) My mom stayed home to look after my siblings; our house was large but not lavish. It took me years to fully register how lucky I was — and how intent my relatives were on creating pathways for kids who were born a lot less lucky.
Soon after I caught wind of our wealth, I got my first glimpse of poverty. I was attending the International School of Manila, whose motto is Integrity, Service and Merit. From sixth grade on, my class did week-long projects that took us to sweltering rice fields several hours north. There we worked in the mud and heat beside desperately poor workers, some of whom were children themselves. We traveled to dirt farms to sort through produce, picking worms off the vegetables on the lines. The more I saw, the more driven I was to understand how poor children were exploited.
Then, when I was in high school, I overheard my parents talk about Voice of the Free. I’d known, in some vague way, about human trafficking — but in the Philippines, it’s a shameful secret, barely mentioned in the news or social media. Again, I pressed my folks for more; they warned me it was a very dark subject. But I persisted, investigating online and bugging them about Voice of the Free. They explained that they helped VF fund the training of Port Police to spot traffickers and their victims in transit. Then last year, they introduced me to Cecilia Oebanda-Pacis by email. She invited me to tour the Center of Hope and — if I was up to it — meet some of her girls.
THIS PAST SUMMER, I returned to Center of Hope, aiming to do more than volunteer. I asked Oebanda-Pacis if I could make a short film about her haven and the women who worked there. At a minimum, the short could live on her website and show the public what VF was about. In the best case, we could share it widely on social media, teaching people the horrors of trafficking in my country and its plague on poor children. She said yes, with one condition: to steer clear of the younger girls, who were still at risk from their abusers.
After a lot of trial and error — I was as clumsy a videographer as I was a dancer — I finally got my subjects in focus and asked them to tell their stories. Ave, a bubbly woman in her mid-twenties, was the youngest of 12 kids from a farming family that subsisted on rice and greens. One day, a well-dressed stranger approached her parents. Your daughter, he said, is a gifted child; I’d like to send her to school in Manila to fulfill her promise. The man kept his word, paying Ave’s tuition and filling her closet with pretty clothes. But a month after Ave moved in with the man, he sat her down in his computer room and connected her to strangers online. Soon, those strangers asked the nine-year-old to strip; some of them flew to Manila to meet her. For five years, Ave and the other children trapped there — three of them aged six and under — were brutally pimped by their trafficker until a neighbor summoned the cops.
Ave was a Center of Hope resident who now works for the organization. “My healing was very difficult but [the staff] became my family and my angels,” she says.
Courtesy Center of Hope
“The police rescued us, then brought us here,” says Ave. “My healing was very difficult — I stayed for 10 years — but [the staff] became my family and my angels.” A year ago, Ave graduated college in Manila with a degree in hospitality. She’s now the events coordinator for VF, shares her earnings with her parents and siblings, and is expecting her first child with her husband. When I asked her why she sat down with me, her eyes blazed up with resolve. Ave fought for years to hold her trafficker accountable, telling her story repeatedly in court. “That man is now in prison for life, and I have freedom and safety. But I [continue to] speak out to stop the abuse. I want no more children to be victims.”
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Oebanda-Pacis shares her resolve. Over the course of 30 years, she’s built an army of allies to take on her country’s shameful secret. “We now have partnerships with churches, business, government and schools,” she says. She’s also helped the cops create halfway houses for the girls they rescue from traffickers. Her new goal is to raise money for community-based treatment, so that those children can heal closer to home. Till then, she’ll keep training the girls in her care to be the next generation of the resistance. “Our secret weapons are acceptance and love,” says Oebanda-Pacis. “We know too well what these girls have been through.”
