Foreign travel evokes different emotions in all of us. The vacation of a lifetime...a monthly business trip...a trip home to see family and friends...a creative retreat...a college semester or year abroad...
...Slavery - Human trafficking.
I've wanted to write about this one for a while. Now I am. I realized that if I'm going to write about culture, confess my love for it, study the complexity of it, and share my small experience, then I can't be quiet about the lowest grade of international travel. One of the very worst examples of international and intercultural relations. It rings the top bell at the carnival midway, along with its hideous relatives, genocide.
Believe it...2010...a human being, child or adult, robbed of identity papers, misled, betrayed or kidnapped, threatened, probably beaten, raped, and/or drugged, and then purchased like so much livestock or other freight, transported like illegal contraband to a city or region of their own country, or maybe a foreign country...cut off from family, friends, language, safety, security, independence, compensation...rights...and forced to do whatever the "owners" order done. The job description? The limits of your imagination might have difficulty encompassing the depravity and injustice of it. The usual suspects first...prostitution...domestic servitude...sexual servitude...drug transportation...theft rings...adult entertainment...forced labor...pornography...sweat shops...It happens everywhere, in every country; yours and mine.
Imagine Italy through the prism of slavery. Ah, the streets of Rome, or Milan on a spring evening...as a prostitute slave. The waters of the Trevi Fountain are suddenly not so playful. There's a tarnish on the romantic glow.
Globally, millions of human beings, are forced into work, bereft of freedom and life and placed at the mercy of human traffickers. Human Trafficking, an odd coupling of words. Isn't it an oxymoron? The term should be Inhuman Trafficking. It's trafficking in us, people like you and me. It's happening in just about every nation in the world.
The United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking or UNGIFT at http://www.ungift.org/ is helping me learn more. Join me.
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