OLYMPIA, Wash - A team of people from Western Washington left Seattle Thursday, bound for Fiji, where they will help build homes for victims of modern day slavery. Among them is a successful Olympia builder whose childhood included being shipwrecked after fleeing Vietnam.  

Now 38, land developer Trong Hong is in the business of building a legacy. The money he makes from an Olympia development will build another village in a jungle thousands of miles away.

Fiji is known as an island paradise, but it has a nasty secret.  There are dozens of ostracized mothers who are survivors of modern-day slavery. Many were sold as little girls.

“She usually has sexual abuse, quite often commercially, sexually exploited in prostitution, very often, likely pornography,” said Linda Smith of Shared Hope International.

The former Washington congresswoman now crafts laws to protect victims of the sex slave industry. She's partnering with the Hongs to build homes in Fiji for the victims. Trong Hong is compelled to help, driven by the horrors he survived as a child.

In the 1970s. Vietnam was a war torn country. His family was desperately poor. One day his dad took him alone for a walk.

“He told me that I would be going away for a little bit and that he would see me soon,” Hong said.  “That's the last time I saw him.”

Hong found himself alone, jammed into the cargo hold of a fishing boat with more than 300 strangers. Nine-year-old Hong became one of the hundreds of thousands boat people fleeing Communism.

Adrift and defenseless, refugees on Hong’s boat became an easy target for modern day pirates. They were attacked several times.

“Then the third time, I actually saw people getting killed, pushed off the boat, getting raped,” he said. 

So with no water, no food, after three days three days at sea people started going crazy. Then they were shipwrecked.

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Trong and Rani Hong, who have both had traumatic childhoods, are now involved in helping victims of slavery.

“The next I know, I was on the beach, started crawling up the island to find the nearest puddle to drink from,” he said.

For the next two years he survived on that nameless Indonesian island, living alone much of the time, in a cave.

There was plenty of food around, mostly fruit and fish in the ocean, and animals. A community of monkeys became his friends.

“God's grace and God's mercy, he had a purpose for me,” Hong said. “Someone was watching over me.”

Finally, rescuers brought them to an Indonesian refugee camp like this one. Then Seattle sponsors flew him to Washington state to build a new life.

About 15 years later, he returned to Vietnam and reunited with his family. He also learned the truth about his father's decision.

“He was doing this for my own good, because if I stay there a few more years I would be dead there,” Hong said.

He would likely have become a child soldier in Vietnam.

Hong now has a family of his own. His business partner and wife Rani is a human trafficking survivor, sold as a child in India.

“I look at the situation, and Trong is a strong man…and God has made him that way, for a purpose,” she said.

Trong Hong chooses to build on his own emotional scars to bring hope to others who suffer.

“Nobody should live the life I lived in the past, there's so much pain,” he said. “To revisit that helps make me a better person, to shape me and mold me, to have compassion to another person in need.”

When the mission’s team returns at the end of the month Rani Hong is scheduled to testify in Wash., D.C., about her experience as a human trafficking survivor.