YO IS a bargirl working on Soi Bangla, in the booming Thai beach resort of Patong. She is 27 years old, tall for a Thai girl, dark skinned, bright eyed and breathtakingly attractive.

Yo is one of the hundreds, maybe thousands, of girls employed in the bar trade of Patong Beach. She is, theoretically, a 'hello' girl. They work the dense flow of human traffic shuffling past the bar trying to entice them inside. Yo will earn 10baht for every drink a customer buys from her, and 50baht for every 'lady drink' which the customer buys for her.

Her real money will come from sleeping with customers. Girls in the better bars of Patong will earn around 5000baht per month in salary and tips. Yo can earn 1500baht by spending the night with a 'farang', a catch all term for westerners

Her salary, 5000baht, is almost enough to get by on. A small apartment can be rented up around Nanai road for 4000baht a month. If she shares her apartment, which will be one bed in a single room some 3 metres square with a bathroom in the corner, this will allow her to live reasonably well on the money that she has coming in. But Yo, along with many, many of her peers, has a problem; she has a son living at home with her mother and she is their only source of income.

Home, for Yo, is Chaiyaphum. Chaiyaphum is a remote, desperately poor North Eastern province. Yo's mother is poor by Chaiyaphum standards, her husband is dead from too much cheap whisky and home is a wooden affair with a tin roof and more holes in the walls than windows to fill them. The floor is earth, the electrics are rudimentary and everyone knows that you do not switch lights on when the rain comes. When the sun shines the temperature rises to 120 degrees inside. The toilet, for Yo's mum, is thirty yards away, shared with the neighbours.

It was not always so for Yo's parents, she married at 18 into a good local family. The boy's parents paid a substantial sin-sod (dowry) which enabled Yo with her new husband, her parents and her sister to move into a house large enough to accommodate them all; the future looked very bright.

Yo's new husband, as a good Thai man would be, was diligent and loving at first, Yo was the most beautiful girl in the village and all the boys coveted her. He was fortunate and knew it. Soon though, he grew restless and adventurous. He found a business opportunity in neighbouring Myanmar, persuaded Yo that his idea was good, and she in turn convinced her parents.

They borrowed some money against the house and followed his dream. Yo's husband was not good with money, he began to drink and to play cards, the business never materialised and soon enough the money was gone, they fought, and then he was gone as well, never to be seen again.

The result for Yo was catastrophic, her family was deemed to owe the money so they lost their home. The whole family moved into the crude wooden house in the blistering dustbowl outside the city where Yo's son was born shortly before her father died.

With no men bringing in money, the girls needed to find work. All rural Thais aspire to owning their own home, once they stop paying rent the amount of money needed to live plummets and they have an asset against which to borrow. The prospect of starting a family business becomes tantalisingly real and independence becomes possible; owning a property is the Holy Grail.

For bargirls, that is the aspiration and the driving force behind doing what they do. For Yo, that Holy Grail is a hopelessly distant dream, for before she buys her own house she has to pay for the one which her husband cost them. The total debt she is saddled with is some 300 thousand baht: an impossibly ambitious sum.

Yo and her sister worked at regular jobs for a while, they could pick rice or other crops for 50baht a day. There is also the possibility of factory work in Nakhon Sawan, a four hour bus trip, but the money is little better.

Inevitably, the girls' eyes are drawn towards the rich farang in the resorts. They hear tales of enormous wealth from girls returning to the village. It never occurs to Yo and her sister that the stories may be exaggerated by girls eager to gain some face, or to hide their shame. They are fallen women in polite Thai society, good girls do not come back to the village wearing short skirts and tattoos; their gold and mobile phones buy them some respect back.

Yo's sister goes first; when one of the village girls heads back to Pattaya, Shin tags along. Within weeks there is money for the family in the post office, as much money as it takes Yo a month to earn in the fields; things begin to look up.

Within months, Shin sends word that she is to marry and go to live in a place called Denmark. There will be no wedding party, no sin-sod, but there are promises of 'big money' because her new husband is a wealthy westerner.

Unfortunately for Shin, and for her family in Chaiyaphum, her new husband had seen their relationship as a business transaction. Once they were safely in Denmark he had taken her passport away and put her to work in a brothel with talk of 'big money', just as soon as she had repaid him for her travel expenses and accommodation, services which he valued at 150 thousand baht and, as he was able to control the flow of cash, he was initially garnishing her 'wages' at around 100%.

Yo, her mother, and her son now had 2000baht a month to live on and it was not enough. Her son needed to go to school and her mum was too old to work. As inevitably as night follows day, Yo travelled with a friend to Phuket and found herself a job in the Blue Lotus Bar on Soi Bangla.

She gets many offers from farang men whilst working; most of them she turns down with a smile and a touch of regret, for the money would help. She is wary of men now, and afraid of most farang men given what happened to her sister. Occasionally though, a genuinely pleasant man drifts through her life and she spends some time with him.

She misses her son desperately; she was not there for his first day at school and he asks for his mum often. She misses her sister as well, and very much hopes that her problems can be solved and that Shin can come home to Thailand so that they can be together again and, maybe, things could be a little better for the family.

And so she works, seven days a week. She does not dream any more, she does not allow herself to. She has done crying too, she is strong and incredibly optimistic. She is an infectious and charming girl, Yo, and her story would break the hardest of hearts.

Like many Thai girls, Yo lives for today. If she is ok now then that will do, tomorrow can be dealt with when it arrives. It's hard to see what the future holds for Yo, but if there is any natural justice she will get what she wants.

As it happens, things are looking up for Yo because by the very fact that people are reading her story, her life is getting better. All the money earned from this article belongs to her.

Ends