Every Day Miracles

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.

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.

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'

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!