A Personal Story About Statelessness 253 was true or not. She said that they paid a lot and my mom took their phone numbers if we were interested. These men were human traffickers. They would pay bribes for referrals. Sometimes girls that went to be prostitutes in the bigger cities got paid to go back to their villages and recruit more young girls to join them. If stateless people work on farms, they get paid a third of what a Thai person would. But if they go to a bigger city and work in a restaurant or as a prostitute, they can earn a living wage. I saw some stateless people drop out of school and go to work as prostitutes. Some of my friends and my sister’s friends went to work in the big cities and came back pregnant or with kids. They would leave their kids with the grandparents and would go back to the city and work again. It is like they would work until they died. Their death was not a good death either. They sent money back to their parents so that their parents could have a good life, but for two of the girls in my village, their dead body was the only thing that came back. They used to live across the street from my house. They got HIV. They only went to school until sixth grade. 6 DEPDC After sixth grade finals, the Development Education Program for Daughters and Communities (DEPDC) staff came to my school. My teachers told us that they were a non-profit organization in Mae Sai and that they were looking for students that would not be able to continue school. The teachers gave me a form to fill out asking why I wanted to go to school. I think I just said, ‘I want to go to school. I’m not ready to work. I don’t want to work in a restaurant or get married like all of my neighbors. My family is poor and I am stateless.’ I wrote the paper, but I thought that they would only support Thai people to go to school. I did not have hope and did not know of any organization that helped stateless people. I knew that the Thai government and other organizations helped poor people or people that didn’t have opportunities, but never stateless people. Seven of my classmates applied. A week later, the staff from DEPDC came to my village. They visited the leader of my village. They visited each family to see who was really poor and who needed help the most. At that time, our house was better than my friends’ houses. We had a television and a refrigerator. My sisters were working in Bangkok and Pattaya, cities in southern Thailand, and they sent us money, so I was afraid that DEPDC wouldn’t support me. But the head of the village helped me a lot. He told them that I worked hard, studied tilburg law review 19 (2014) 248-260