MEET OUR SURVIVORS AND INDIA STAFF - LEARN MORE ABOUT HUMAN TRAFFICKING AND HOW WE FIGHT IT:

Each year we make site visits and take a team of volunteers to work with survivors and high risk kids at our partner shelters. We assess programs, and offer therapeutic art project to kids, teens and adults, to build relationships and to learn more about their needs, hopes and dreams, so that we can provide continuing and meaningful services throughout the year.

It is hard to find words for everything I feel and all the wonderful and inspiring things that have happened this week. At the same time, it has sometimes been overwhelming, and some moments have been difficult to bear.  Most of the girls and children that we have been working with for the past few years are thriving – making a success out of lives that they could never have imagined - but there are a few that we have lost, or that in dire peril, and it is hard to come face to face with that reality.  We are doing everything in our power to intervene and help these individuals, and I am grateful to have the chance to try, but working on this issue, in this underworld, there are huge challenges.

On Monday morning, we began our 2 weeks of programming in Calcutta shelters and red light areas, starting with our very own Destiny girls.  After some very silly and hilarious icebreakers, we joined in a forum discussion about women’s rights,  comparing progress and continuing challenges in the women’s rights movements of each.  We talked about the fact that although the girls all consider America more progressive, we have yet to have a woman president or vice president, whereas India has had two women in the two highest offices.

 The girls felt that the biggest difference between Indian and American women is their confidence.  American women have more
confidence, they unanimously think, because we are allowed to make all kinds of decisions for ourselves – what to wear, where and how long to study, who to marry, where to live, if we work, and in what field.  In India, especially among the poor and in villages, male relatives make all these decisions.  Even Becky has to give her father’s name every time she wants to rent an apartment of get a cellphone or Internet connection.  Obviously, this systemic sexism is a huge factor in human
trafficking.  

Today we visited 10 of our school sponsored kids who have been placed in Ram Krishna Mission Boarding School.  It was absolutely amazing! The kids looked so good, so happy and healthy and clean, that I almost did not recognize them.  These girls, aged 6-13,  were all born into the Kidderpore red light community of Calcutta.   Their mothers were
trafficked as young girls into brothels, and are still working the streets, kept captive now by a complete lack of other options, and by the extreme stigma hanging like a cloud over the whole district.
 
When the children lived at home, they shared a tiny room in the brothel with their mothers – it was a dangerous situation in the extreme, as there is always the risk that a client would tire of the mother and reach for her young daughter instead.  Our partner agency Apne Aap, which runs a prevention program in Kidderpore, eventually took these 10 girls into the night shelter because they were at especially high risk or had already been exploited.  The Emancipation Network began paying for their schooling three years ago and this past spring, they were enrolled in the Boarding School.

I’m writing this from the plane, en route to Calcutta, India, to participate in our annual volunteer trip, and to launch a whole new program which will train and eventually employ survivors as silversmiths, a highly respected and marketable trade.   We already sell a range of survivor-made jewelry on our website, but up to now, we’ve bought all the components, and the survivors have designed and assembled them into the finished pieces.  We’ve never before trained survivors to pound, bend, blowtorch, drill, rivet, melt and cast the metal into any shape and de

One of the first and biggest obstacles to overcoming modern slavery is the lack of public awareness and outcry.  If we found out there were people being kept as slaves in our own hometown, shouldn't we all drop everything to march in the streets and rush to rescue those people?  Oh, wait... there are slaves in many of our hometowns.  There are children working as slaves in factories and quarries and brothels and private homes and begging in the streets all over this global village - in many cases, these slaves are right out in the open for anyone to see.  So where is the public outcry?  Thanks to many heroic people around the world who have dropped everything else they were doing to respond to the emergency of slavery, the tide is beginning to turn. President Obama has just declared January to be 'National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month'

I think you will enjoy this moving and deeply personal letter from Silvio Silva, Director of one of our partner agencies in Nepal – Apple of God’s Eye. This organization just celebrated its nine year anniversary in Nepal, and they are now caring for 170 survivors and street children and helping hundreds more through education and outreach programs.
In 2010, we will be launching a new initiative with Apple of God’s Eye - marketing the handmade, fair trade rugs made by AOGE survivors - to individuals, faith communities, and colleges across America. Stay tuned because we are going to need everyone’s help to make this new program a success.

The annual Freedom Awards event in Los Angeles, hosted by FreetheSlaves,  brought international attention to the abolition cause, and honored unsung heroes such as Sina Vann from Cambodia and Veero from Pakistan - both survivors of slavery who have dedicated their lives to rescuing others from slavery.
I was blown away, and humbled, by one small detail of Veero's story: In order to get resources to help rescue her neighbors from bonded labor slavery on farms or in heavy industy, Veero sometimes sells a pot from her own kitchen.  I know sometimes I think I work hard, or have given up a lot to do this work, but imagine if you had just two pots, and you had to sell one of them to free a neighbor?!  Veero lives in a simple thatched dwelling with a dirt floor - from this no-frills headquarters, she has helped several hundred people to freedom.  Talk about keeping it real! 

In India, just like here in America, weddings are fun and powerful celebrations that bring together families. Weddings are normal, happy, and a core part of the progression of life. But weddings are not typically part of the normal happy life for survivors of sex trafficking. Some have even been trafficked by means of false marriages. More importantly, it’s very hard for survivors of sex trafficking to get over the stigma that they are somehow bad or dirty, and to get accepted into a new family or community.

To one of our partners in India, Rescue Foundation, this was unacceptable. Rescue Foundation rescues girls out of sex trafficking with the goal of reintegrating them back into their typically rural, agricultural communities. These communities often have a shortage of eligible women to marry due to a gender selection.

In Firojpur, a remarkable group of children who were recently working as slaves alongside their parents are now learning to read and write in a simple bamboo bungalow.  They are students at TEN's Freedom School in Uttar Pradesh, India. The hands now weilding pencils held instead the tools of heavy labor, working in quarries or toiling on farms from dawn to dusk, and the future seemed devoid of other alternatives.    Millions of families are enslaved in bonded labor across South Asia. They never see the benefits of their dirty, dangerous or degrading work -Instead, they are working off ‘debts’ typically less than $100, which only accumulate over time as the system is designed to keep them in bondage indefinitely. Threats of violence, or actual violence, serve to keep them enslaved, and many do not realize that bonded labor is an illegal practice.