For award winner Maizidah Salas, a former migrant worker and survivor of human trafficking, the pain is still all too real, even though she has been back in Indonesia for years.

“I have been through it all, I was persuaded, recruited and had my documents falsified. I worked for three months without pay, not according to the contract and with no days off. I was not allowed to own a cellphone or talk with outsiders,” she told a discussion recently in Jakarta.

“Even now, talking about all of my experiences is still hard and it can still make me cry. It was such a severe trauma.”

Maizidah established the Village of Migrant Workers in her hometown Wonosobo, Central Java, to empower other victims, especially financially, in addition to legal aid and trauma recovery.

Through her initiative, Maizidah became one of the 10 antihuman-trafficking heroes according to the 2018 Trafficking In Person (TIP) report, issued yearly by the United States government.

Together with other awardees, such as Nepal’s Sunita Danuwar and Burkina Faso’s Josue Ango, Maizidah received the award from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US President Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, in Washington DC in June.

“Basically, when someone leaves the country to find work, they need money, and when they are back home and do not have jobs, they will leave again,” she said, adding that it was extremely important for victims to be able to find jobs in their hometowns.

She said the government did not consider economic empowerment when handling trafficking cases, it was only concerned about how to ensure the victims’ mental and physical health recovered.

“That’s why they leave the country again, because the government does not fully solve the issue of financial problems,” she said.

Maizidah understands this vicious circle all too well. After her husband left her in 1996, she decided to borrow money to work in South Korea, but her company closed before she completed her training, as the economic crisis hit Asia in 1997, and she was subsequently deported.

With no job, Maizidah convinced her parents to sell their land to get her to work abroad, this time as a caregiver in Taiwan.

“I was told I would be a caregiver for an old woman, but when I arrived, it was a family of eight living in a four-story house,” she said, adding that she had to work from 4 a.m. until 1 a.m. at her employer’s restaurant and do household chores as well.

She then left to work illegally as a waiter, a caregiver and even in factories without pay for almost a year while her debts accumulated.

Life finally turned out for the better when she met a fellow worker from the same village.

“She was also an illegal worker, but she helped me find a decent job. We then rented an apartment to help others so they would not live like us,” she said.

Later the community grew and with other workers they set up an advocate organization for migrant workers.

Up until 2006 before she was deported, Maizidah and her friends campaigned for migrant workers’ rights, meeting them in public spaces such as train stations, churches, mosques, even by trespassing in factories in the middle of the night.

“Because what really happened is workers were told if anything happened, they had to report it to their agents, not the government. But the agents can’t do anything, and sometimes they are the ones who make them work without pay,” she said.

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