Sign of the Times.

Amie’s gap year was everything she had dreamed of. South East Asia’s vibrant, colourful culture teemed with life. Thailand, the land of smiles, was alive with a modern buzz, and an ancient ambiance, with the Buddhist temple of Wat Pho at its heart.

So far on her travels she had learned four guitar chords, which were adequate entertainment in Bangkok’s hostels. She wrangled with the beautiful language, to the amusement and endearment of the locals, and graced every surface she touched with black smudged fingerprints from the chalk and charcoal art she drew to record her journey in a little black book.

Cambodia was less tourist oriented. Minimal English was spoken, and the road from the airport had been a dusty track. Her best efforts to learn the language, Khmer, had been met with some confusion, but Amie was struck by the people’s kindness. A village farmer allowed the group to stay in a room above his farm shed, with a large rusty padlock jamming the rotting door shut. It stifled any chance of a cooling breeze and boarded the wild rabid dogs outside. They attempted an intriguing breakfast of tomato juice an hour before dawn, before they piled onto a tuk-tuk. Amie sketched the farmer’s scratchy face, leaving a page for the sunrise landscape. The guide was barely ten years old and far nimbler than the clunky backpackers as they trekked through the terrain, stumbling.

Amie watched the sun rise over Angkor Wat through bleary eyes that made the sunlight streak across her vision. She used chalk to capture how the rays glanced off the stone edges, and charcoal where shadows were cast. The lanky boy-guide thoroughly enjoyed posing for his portrait, and Amie was both taken aback and touched when he stretched out his hand for the picture. Amie tore it out, gave it to him, and took a mental snapshot of his shining face to draw later.

The children moved Amie the most. The vast majority she had seen were working in tourism. In the Cambodian floating city, where houses were built on stilts to avoid flooding in the rainy season, there was a charity encouraging donations towards schoolbooks and writing equipment. Their positivity was harshly juxtaposed by the posters of missing children strewn over shop windows. Amie tried to capture all angles, sketching the piles of second-hand textbooks, the children pleading for sweets, cheekily competing with the charity workers grafting for pencils, and a poster of a girl with freckles, prominent ears and two huge front teeth, who had disappeared some time ago.

As Amie sat on the tiny plane to Vietnam, she looked lazily for other passengers to become additions to her artbook. A twenty-something boy in hareems, who had purchased an unnecessarily large painted fan and was struggling with his cumbersome luggage. A girl with tan lines around her eyes from wearing circular sunglasses, a braid in her hair and countless bracelets on both arms. A young boy with no luggage and a bowl haircut sat with his with their father, who seemed disgruntled, presumably at the child’s obstinate silence and lack of cooperation with luggage.

She settled on the latter pair; interested to see how quickly the boy would tire of his mood. After an hour of watching, Amie had their body proportions and shapes captured, along with the beginnings of some detailed features. The boy’s clothes were baggy and unkempt, his nails were bitten, and he kept reaching up to his shoulder, as if searching to fiddle with a pigtail he couldn’t find. He had not uttered a word since boarding and remained staring blankly at the fold down tray in front of him.

Puzzled, Amie flicked through her art book looking for her putty rubber to smudge some shadows under the boy’s eyes, and to add in some shadow to highlight his ears that stuck out from under his bowl cut. She allowed the chalk stick to pivot around her thumb.

His face seemed oddly familiar, although somewhat gaunt. Amie readjusted her chair so she could better inspect. He had faded freckles, and Amie delicately placed each one onto her picture, smattering them across his face.

Amie coughed, hoping he would turn his head, but he remained resolute in staring down the seat in front of him. Amie’s brow furrowed as she smudged charcoal on her chin, and she slipped her notebook into her back pocket. She ordered a black coffee from the air hostess, and asked whether the little boy wanted anything, to which his father shook his head and bluntly indicated that the two did not speak English.

Frustrated at the hostility, Amie stood up holding her coffee, and stumbled over her backpack which had become dislodged from where she had stuffed it below the seat in front. Amie and the boy were drenched with rather hot coffee. The boy looked up with wide eyes, his lips parted in shock to reveal distinctive front teeth.

The air hostess scurried over, and Amie began apologising profusely. The father was distinctly disgruntled, he scowled at Amie and uttered some rough words that she was quite frankly glad she did not understand. The boy looked confused and stood up to brush the puddle of coffee off his lap. The father grabbed his arm and the two exchanged a tense look, before the boy broke eye contact, and quickly sat down in his coffee drenched seat, shoulders hunched.

Amie held out her hand to the boy, gesturing towards the bathroom. The lines on the father’s face deepened into trenches, and his grip on the boy’s arm tightened. Amie raised her eyebrows and the air hostess seemed taken aback. The man hurriedly released the boy, who Amie ushered down the aisle. He remained silent.

Amie knelt beside the boy and used water to wet a cloth to dab at his clothes. The boy flinched, recoiling from the contact. He opened his mouth but uttered no words that Amie could understand. She tried what little Thai she could remember – ‘Sawa-di-ka?’, ‘Kap-un-ka?’. Her mind went blank as she desperately tried to recall any Khmer. Her phone was in her backpack and would not have been any use in flight mode anyway.

Amie sighed, and the boy hung his head. Amie squatted down lower, so she was looking up into his face, and held out her hands, trying to seem as unintimidating as possible. Tears rolled off the end of the boy’s nose, as Amie’s little black notebook slipped from her pocket. Amie was frustrated, these pockets were too shallow to bend down in, and now her art was lying face down on the grotty toilet floor.

Absent-mindedly, she picked it up and flipped through some pages, when the boy gasped and grabbed the book. He leafed through the pages, smudging the charcoal. Amie watched as he pointed to her drawing of the floating city. She took the book, and delicately turned over the page, to show the picture of the missing girl. The boy pointed to the picture, back to himself, and back to the picture. He held the book aside his face, and desperately mimed long hair, before making a violent chopping motion, and gesturing fearfully towards the aisle.

Both girls’ eyes filled with tears, their mouths open as they whispered without words. The language barrier had been broken, and Amie held her arms open for the missing girl.

Amie motioned to the air hostess, who, in broken English, advised the two remain with her at the back of the plane until landing. They were escorted through the airport, and the girl clung to Amie as they were marched into a severe room with bright lights and several stony-faced police who spoke in Vietnamese.

Minutes crawled by, and both girls prayed the man from the plane was being taken as far away from them as possible. Amie snapped her sticks of chalk and charcoal, giving the larger pieces to the girl. They sat opposite each other, the book in between, drawing anything to distract them from their sterile surroundings.

Amie was relieved when the translator arrived, although the girl was reluctant to approach. Whilst authorities could not confirm who the girl was, they had identified the man. A wanted individual charged with child abduction and trafficking, travelling with a stolen passport. He was an integral key to a ring of monsters, who had been avoiding the international police for years. A ringing in Amie’s ears became louder as the translator mentioned something about a reward fund, twenty thousand dollars, for anyone providing leads relating to the gang. The policeman was talking too quickly, and the translator spoke fragmentedly, trying to keep up and maintain content.

Amie’s mind whirled with what horrific scenes the child must have endured – she tried to think of an international symbol for safety, peace and home. She settled on a sketch of a pregnant mother cradling her bump, and pointed with a clammy, chalky finger. The little girl touched the picture to her chest. She was going home.

Amie gave her statement and stayed to ensure the child’s safe return to her mother. She donated most of the reward fund to the charity in the floating city, supplying stationery for the working children, to inspire and enable their creativity.

She used the remainder to found an international campaign, ‘Know the Signs’. The motion raises awareness of the signs of trafficking: unexplained physical injury, scripted answers, lack of personal possessions, and a fearful or submissive victim. They campaign for the adoption of an international signal for help. Gratefully adopted from the domestic abuse initiative, Amie’s charity teaches that to ask for help:

Hold your hand palm facing forward, four fingers extended, side by side, and thumb tucked in front of the palm. Then close the four fingers over the thumb to make a fist.