When I first came to the Philippines in 1969, I was assigned to a parish in the City of Olongapo where there was a huge U.S. military base and a local industry that shamelessly exploited women and children turning them into prostitutes with the full approval of the local government. I left the church building one night to explore this modern Sodom and Gomorrah dressed in jeans and a light shirt. I could easily have been mistaken for one of the thousand of sailors out looking for women or children to abuse as far as the local pimps were concerned. And so I was mistaken for a sailor. Walking along the street of blazing neon lights and loud rock sounds from the bars and clubs that lined the central street was deafening. It was an unnatural place with the frightening aura of evil.

I was approached by a Filipino man, he offered me women for sex. When I said I wasn't interested he offered me a very young one, "she is only thirteen and a virgin", he said, "just for thirty dollars you can have her all night". I was shocked, angered and outraged at the terrible suggestion. I then saw the little girl being held in a doorway across the road by a women who was clearly his accomplice. I threaten to call the police, but he just laughed and walked away taking the child to another hangout. This was my first experience of the horrors of child labor, the worst kind of all, child prostitution. Many hundreds of thousand are held as sex slaves in brothels all over the world but perhaps most of all in SouthEast Asian countries like Thailand, the Philippines, and in Central Asia the Indian Sub-continent, where the trade in child flesh is most rampant.

To get away from this terrible situation in Olongapo City where I felt so helpless to change anything I went to the countryside and there too I saw small half naked children as young as five years old carrying heavy pails of water, working in the fields or carrying heavy bundles of wood when they should have been enjoying a childhood filled with school, learning and games. Instead they were child laborers with brain damage from the lack of good food and would grow up illiterate swelling the ranks of the rural poor and providing the rich with cheap labor to work in their plantations or to sweat in the factories. Sporting goods factories, carpet weaving shops, brick factories, and hundreds of other sweat shops exploit children without any concern for their well being. It was these experiences of such inhuman treatment of children that motivated me to start the Preda Foundation and the Preda Fair Trading project in 1974, five years after I first arrived in the Philippines. I could not stand by any longer wringing my hands and saying how terrible it was. I had to do something, however small it was to alleviate just a little of the misery and human suffering of children and young people.

I came to realize that alternatives had to be found. The parents of the working children had to be employed for fair living wages and the children be taken out of the work force and into the school. At the Preda center where we cared for exploited young people, I had educated them after a life of neglect and drug abuse we were successful in getting many of them back to school and reconciled with their families. Then for the parents we provided work with dignity. With a small group of skilled weavers we began a handicraft and small furniture industry using local skills, traditional designs and renewable materials.

At the same time, together with Filipino co-workers we conducted public education seminars on human and children's rights even before the "Convention on the Rights of the Child," had been adopted by the United Nations. By trying to change attitudes and expose the plight of the children, appealing to U.S. and Philippine authorities, change might come we hoped.

The unemployed crafts people around Olongapo were happy to get a steady job in the Preda handicraft project. But no matter how hard the artisans worked to produce well finished steady products of quality the local buyers were only willing to pay low prices, and I did find customers who really appreciated these products, the wives of the Navy officers who managed the naval base nearby. They began to buy and to pay good prices. The project prospered, the workers were content at the good wages. This was one way to stop child labor, employ the parents and send the children to school.

But when I discovered in 1982 that there was still wide spread child sex abuse by the US sailors run by a local mafia I exposed it in the press. The local politicians who made money out of the trade in women and children were very angry and tried to silence our voicesof protest and close the Preda Center and stop production. No one at the Navy base came anymore to buy, we were facing collapse and a loss of about twenty jobs.

But it was at that time that a GEPA representative came vising one day and having studied our project promised to support us to find a new market. That is how we began exporting and expanding to help many other producers groups find appreciative customers. It provided many more jobs to hundreds of impoverished families who have since prospered, worked their way out of poverty and educated their children on fair wages.

In Cebu the poor live in the remote mountains and cultivate mango trees that thrive there. But they had to borrow in the off-season to survive and had no capital to bring their trees into production so they became victims of loan sharks, who took their land and trees and forced them to migrate to the city. There, living in terrible squalor and inhuman conditions, their children went begging from the tourists and from there many were lured into prostitution. Others never went to school and had to work in the fashion accessories factories, others worked on construction sites carrying sand and cement, some work as stevedores on the wharves loading and off loading ships. If only the farmers could be helped to stay in their villages beat the loan sharks and harvest their own fruit, I thought, they would surely prosper and we could stop the flow of children to the cities and child labor sweat shops.

That's when Preda began providing capital and loans to a newly formed cooperative in the hills on Cebu Island. With the technical training, the trees produced bumper harvests but would they get a fair price and in good time before the fruit became rotten? The Preda project helped there too, by providing them a direct link to the export market for the big fruits and for the medium and small a direct link to the processing plant, where the unfit for export fruits will be turned to dried mango and juice.

The farmers sold everything at high prices and that stopped their migration to the cities and also child labor. It was all possible because Gepa and others found buyers who loved the taste of the dried mangoes and wanted to help change the world. Today the impact on the industry is important, it is the farmers who are able to set the prices for their fruit not the rich exporters. They are free from exploitation and their children are free to learn, grow and lead a life free from child labor.