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Malikavaz is a woman in our early 20s and she is very far from home.

Don't ask where.

I'm going to try to say this without saying like country names because I feel like that could expose me to danger.

We can tell you it's early 2018 and she's in a major city in East Asia.

You can hear the sounds of the city all around you, there's traffic, there's the hustle and bustle of a big boomer industrial city.

More specifically, she's with the filmmaker in a seafood market inside a shopping mall.

People around her are laughing and talking.

There was just a ton of different kinds of stores with everything from shock, fin to ivory, to manteries, to pangolin skills, like literally every imaginable kind of wildlife.

But Malik is not there to shop, she's there to investigate seafood smuggling.

She talks with the seafood trader, a young woman there with her child.

Then Malikavaz happens to turn around.

She notices two people in police uniforms with walkie talkies, they're watching her.

I'd seen them a couple of times that day but that's when I realized that we would be watched.

Malik and the filmmaker immediately start pretending to be tourists.

To be like, hey let's take a selfie together, let's like, you know, just like huddle together and take pictures.

And get out and buy this beautiful shawl that you have on your store front, right?

So we have to really, really make that shift super fast.

Wait, so who, who could they have been? Like who, who were you afraid these uniform people were?

They were from the government, that's the uniform.

Why would a government not want you to be doing that?

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