LA based abolitionists, Project Exodus - Necessity to Invention
Posted by Mike Mastern on 14/05/2009 at 08:34 AM / 0 comments
There is a good saying that “necessity is the mother of invention”. Usually this quote is used in reference to relatively non-important items. For example, perhaps a man once needed to tie his shoe but couldn’t. All of a sudden, before the world knew what hit it, BAM, there was Velcro. Necessity --> invention.
The story of Project Exodus is much like the man and his shoe. However, though both ideas were birthed out of necessity, the consequences of a failure to invent were dramatically different. In the one case, had the man with the shoe problem failed to invent Velcro, well, I guess the world would just still be trying to tie its shoes. In our case (both us personally and all of humanity), should we fail to find an invention to our problem, the consequences would be the continued ####, oppression, and enslavement of tens of millions of humans on this planet, all of whom were made in the image of God and are dearly loved by Him. Understanding the severity and magnitude of modern day slavery, we clearly understood the “need”. Project Exodus came about when we asked ourselves one simple question: where is the invention?
Today, though faced with one of the largest evils ever seen in the history of the world, the modern abolitionist movement is relatively ineffective. On the one hand there are thousands, if not millions of people who learn about human trafficking every day, have their hearts break and want to do something about it. These people rally together, host fund raisers, and conduct awareness events, all in the hopes that their voices will be loud enough to make up for the deadening silence of the world in the face of oppression. Though there have been many names for these people throughout time, today they are simply and accurately called activists.
On the other hand, there are a handful of small but effective organizations, agencies, and governments that professionally go after the modern slave trade. Each group has its own specific “brand” of abolitionism but in the end they all work towards a common vision: the liberation of the 27 million faceless victims of oppression everywhere in the world. We call these professional abolitionist groups.
The problem in the abolitionist movement comes from the fact that there is currently a divide between the activist abolitionist movement and the professional abolitionist movement. Though there are plenty of people who are livid with human trafficking and desperately want to make a difference, when they try to go beyond a mere activist position to actually making a tangible difference, they are told by the professional abolitionist that they should leave the dirty work to them. The result is not only that thousands get frustrated and discouraged, but that the army of justice seekers in which God has blessed us with is not being used to capacity!
Recognizing this, and also recognizing that there IS tangible work that the average activist can do, we came up with the idea for Project Exodus. At its heart, Project Exodus is Christian organization that seeks to directly fight human trafficking by recruiting passionate activists to pray over and directly observe potential trafficking spots in Los Angeles, California. We believe strongly that every individual can be an invaluable part of the fight against human trafficking. Furthermore, we believe strongly that our God is a god of Justice and that should any person decided to follow the call and loose the chains of injustice, the glory of the Lord will be their rear guard (Isaiah 58). In essence, we believe full heartedly that through Christ all things are possible, including an end to slavery!
Human trafficking is interesting because it is a hidden activity that happens right in front of your eyes. What we and the traffickers have both realized (them much earlier than us) is that the reason we do not see human trafficking is that we are not looking for human trafficking. Once the scales of this world are removed and we begin to seek justice, then we are able to find the darkness where it is happening.
Knowing what to look for and where to look, Project Exodus sends teams to do direct observation of potential trafficking locations in hopes of building up cases and proving that trafficking is in fact happening. Furthermore, knowing how stretched for resources most organizations and law enforcement agencies are, our goal is to build up a strong enough case that upon handing it over to law enforcement, all that needs to take place is the actual freeing of the girls and the arrest of the perpetrators. By providing this service, not only do we free up law enforcement and allow them to focus on the most pressing cases, but we also take advantage of the mass amount of people who want to make a difference and end trafficking, thus filling the middle ground and linking the divide between the activist and the professional abolitionist.
We have been given a promise from the God of Justice that whoever should decide to loose the chains of injustice, to free the oppressed and be a voice for the voiceless, that the glory of the Lord will be their rearguard and that their night shall shine like noonday. Through the power of Christ, every individual has the power to be a champion of justice. Understanding this, Project Exodus seeks to be an organization that taps into the limitless power of God’s children, using them in the way that they were intended, to love passionately and to seek justice! How is that for invention?
Cross Border Initiatives - Gaz Kashire
Posted by Gaz Kashire on 27/04/2009 at 11:15 AM / 0 comments
I heard the other day that psychologists have put pen to paper concerning a ‘40 something syndrome’. Something so much deeper than the mere ‘mid life crisis’ label so readily attached. A possibility of a life re-orientation, to take a deeper step into participation in the human race and a step further away from passive observation and opinions formed for the dinner table. I am 43 this year and I can say such a thing exists, and it need not result in a Harley Davidson or a tacky Convertible car so clearly unsuited to the English weather.
Walking round yet another festival with a fair trade and justice fringe, I found myself having an inner wrestle. That knotted feeling where your disinterest and disconnection from issues like poverty, homelessness and whole continents like Africa is met with a desperate desire to just flipping well engage with something, anything. There was a startling realisation of just how much I still live for myself and surround myself with the relatively stable and trendy people of society, where my love and life is of some value. Instead of laying myself poured out at the feet those for whom my desperate ill-conceived efforts could actually mean ‘everything’!
I had to go digging around somewhere deep in my underbelly to rediscover what my ‘motivator ‘ is and it didn’t take long to remember, having done performance poetry in years gone, where if I wasn’t ANGRY about something, that pen just wouldn’t write.
So, that’s a rather long way of saying how I arrived at 2 questions which have pretty much shaped my use of time over the last 2 years: Firstly - what am I really angry about - enough to do something about it and secondly - I know what I’m living for… but what would I be willing to die for…… and then came the answer. I would pour myself out and live dangerously to see just one young teen girl not end up getting systematically raped up to 40 times a day, being forced to have abortions, possibly contracting HIV and having such a degree of psychological damage that even if she gets back home, she may never fully recover..
Ok, so I’ve got a focus, and I’m not alone in my town with people thinking through how to respond to trafficking issues both home and abroad. It probably took me about a week to clarify a direction, as all the issues around trafficking are important but my desire was to get to the roots in a culture where the girls are trafficked from and consider how to get involved in education and prevention. To date, almost every testimony I have heard from trafficking survivors, one theme has been consistent ‘I didn’t know such a thing could happen – that people could just buy and sell people, people like me’. In Eastern Europe at least, people are not growing up expecting to be sold by a parent, a husband, a boyfriend, orphanage staff or the travel agent.
Towards the end of 2008 some friends and I who have some experience in mixed media began to chat about the possibility of developing a glossy youth culture magazine as an education and prevention tool in East European schools and communities. The backdrop of having produced magazines and worked in youth culture made us foolish enough to think we could actually do something like that and so we began to try and contact agencies abroad but to no avail. 6 months later it seemed that we had got it all wrong, and the lack of progress seemed to highlight that our well-thought out idea was indeed foolish. Perhaps it was more about our need to feel useful than something in season or even needed by people on the ground, perhaps we had got it entirely wrong. Then in February this year something shifted, through relational links with people in ridiculously diverse locations like Darwin Australia, Orlando and London, we were in conversations with 3 groups in the same county, the same city, Chisinau (kish in aw) Moldova.
Moldova is the poorest country in Europe and widely accepted to be the engine of the European trafficking machine. God is very interesting, I had not sought to connect with Moldova specifically but articles and films over the years had all pointed me in that direction, I had just forgotten. One awesome article in particular from the New Yorker concerned a repatriation worker from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Moldova completely crystallised this. (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/05/080505fa_fact_finnegan)
So conversations begin and were not just hearing that the magazine would be a interesting idea, but it would be a great idea, a brilliant idea and not only that, each of the contacts were forming similar ideas but lacked the skills to develop such a magazine.
I have just returned from Moldova and now carry in my headspace the personal stories of victims, which I have yet to allow myself to emotionally connect with. They are just too difficult to comprehend, it’s so f’d up that I’m going to have to make space for myself to process their complexity or horror, lest the feelings sneak out at an inappropriate moment, triggered but God knows what. Whilst in Moldova I attempted to meet Stella Rotaru, the repatriation worker from the article whose job is getting the girls back home, she is the closest thing I have to a heroine. Whilst my host had said he would set up a meet, it didn’t look very likely that we would now connect as her line manager explained, ‘since the article she has been overwhelmed with journalists’. It would have to go through the head of IOM Moldova. When he heard about the magazine though, he enthusiastically insisted that a meeting take place with his trafficking head of department as well as Stella and the head of psychology. We had the meet and in the space of an hour we went from a ‘them and us’ conversation to ‘we’. Our prayer prior to the meeting was that we would start around the table but end up on one side of the table facing the issue together. Beautiful people engaged in trying to undo a complete horror show. As a result of this meeting I have to go back and participate in a brainstorming session to develop the magazines contents with local trafficking and welfare agencies, this is with IOM, Unicef and the Peace Corps who have 30 volunteers in Moldova working on trafficking issues. – Crazy!
We now hope to see the first magazine being distributed throughout Moldova from October onwards, full of normal youth culture stuff and seasoned with articles around trafficking prevention, HIV, gender equality, domestic violence and other issues. One of the issues, which the magazine can remain constant in addressing, is in exposing the ever-changing strategies of the traffickers, a specific aim of this magazine being produced regularly. It is already intended that the Russian language edition will go to another 5 Russian speaking trafficking countries.
Our hope is that this magazine will become part of popular culture, to change culture. Media still has the power to shape and change a nations worldview.
Our commitment in this is very specific and measured. Unlike so many projects, which try to hit the enormity of the issues in one go, we have taken an Aim At Something To Hit Something approach in developing this magazine for Schools/ Orphanages and Rural Communities – something tangible.
Our aim over the next few months as people from the Bournemouth area and beyond is to raise 15,000 pounds to develop and fund the first 2 pilot editions of the magazine and to train people on the ground in Moldova to continue its development. Any help you can give in achieving this outcome is greatly appreciated. Can you help?
Story:
I met an American family who are involved in developing post orphanage homes for Girls to transition into life in Chisinau. They were in the process of adopting one of the girls from an orphanage to come and live with them in America, this story was conveyed to me by the girl who would have been her new sister.
She had been going out with a boy for a year and was invited to meet him at a party but when she arrived he was not there and she found herself in a room with 20 men who systematically raped and abused her for God knows how long. Her boyfriend had sold her as a piece of entertainment for his mates. She is now so psychologically damaged and shut down that she is in a mental institution. Such stories of people being sold and traded as commodities are constant in Moldova.