Slavery

http://www.polarisproject.org/

Last week I saw a movie called The Whistleblower, based on one woman's real life experiences as a Gender Specialist investigating crimes against women overseas, in the areas most plagued by the Serbian and Croatian wars: a Muslim woman brutally beat by a husband who hadn't been prosecuted prior, and the abduction of teenage girls for sale. Naturally it affected me, because it's such a powerful story about hatred and prejudice, but I returned the DVD to the library and let it go....or so I thought. 

A few days later, I went a couple of doors down to my favorite pizzeria in between cycles at the laundromat. I got into a conversation with the guy behind the counter. At first we chatted about pizza, cooking, the sometimes hilarity of so-called "diets", and then we talked about locales. He asked me if I was new to the area, and then I asked where he was from. He said "Kosovo", and I admitted it's an area I don't know much about, except for the worst news reports. He didn't dispel my notions outright, saying there's "nothing" over there. I mentioned the movie I'd seen, and at this point, all three men behind the counter joined in the conversation.

Turns out, the Super Bowl here in the States was Ground Zero for human trafficking, and we discussed how major world events can become natural cloud cover for illegal activities. It made me think about the Olympics in Sochi going on right now. God only knows what horrors exist right beneath the surface, out in the open, blind as we are attending these sports events, except to our own amusement. As one of the delivery guys showed me the news story on his smart phone, I scrolled down the sad, sick story. "How alone they must feel, like we don't care about them....like no on loves them", I said to him, reading about people sold like meat, killed after they're used, nameless and faceless to society, lost after their identities are obliterated with fake passports. And they're right to feel such despair, when we routinely ignore suffering that's so obvious around us every day, because it seems unbelievably horrific, or someone elses' problem. 

It seems so insurmountable: overwhelming, frightening, threatening. "Well, what can I do about it?" After all, no one goes to a ball game to cry into their expensive beer about some teenage girl unlucky enough to seek work in another country to support her family by answering an ad in the paper for maids in a hotel, somewhere "over there", far away from here. But we can do something. We can talk about it. We can publicize it. Just like the Super Bowl. Just like the Olympics.

http://www.thewhistleblower-movie.com/

http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/eye-on-football/24429762/fbi-rescues-16-juveniles-in-super-bowl-human-trafficking-operation 

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/20185681/ns/dateline_nbc/t/woman-rescued-human-traffickers/