~Thankful For A Classmate~

I'm not one for having to choose when it comes to things such as who I'm thankful for, but since we have to, I'll choose. I've known Chigo since we were in Mrs. Furuta's kindergarten class way back when in 2000. Seems like a whole lifetime ago but we've been good buddies since.

Chigo and I have gone through a lot in our years at our old school and have managed to work through all nine years there and through our first year here at Whitney. But she's always been someone to make me laugh, especially when we had to get through a boring algebra class at the end of the day.

Over the years, we have fallen a little bit out of touch but once we graduated from our old school, we found we were going to be the only two coming to Whitney. So we have been able to get back in touch and still have just as much fun as we used to. Happy Thanksgiving Everyone :)

~Modern Slavery~

I still remember when I first learned about slavery.  It was when we learned about the American Civil War in elementary school.  I remember being angry and disgusted that people could actually own people, never mind how they treated them when they did.  The whole concept was bizarre and evil.  For many years, I wasn’t aware that even today, slavery exists.  Through my research for this blog posting, I’ve learned a lot to add to the little that I knew.  For example, did you know that human trafficking (which is the sale of people to work for others at low or no wages, i.e., slave labor) is so widespread that there are hundreds of organizations and agencies devoted to fighting it around the world?  Or that the United Nations, through their work with many of these organizations, now estimates that presently, there are over 27 million people working as slaves?  How could this be in this day and age?

What I learned through doing this research is that just like hundreds of years ago, many people are either tricked or coerced into slavery because they initially are convinced it will help them provide a better life for their families.  Poor, undereducated people in rural as well as urban areas across the globe wind up going to work in other countries (including the U.S.) to do the jobs (called “dirty jobs” by many of the slavery prevention organizations) that others who are better educated won’t do or will demand higher wages to perform.  For example, in the Ivory Coast, there are numerous ‘locateurs’ or slave recruiters, who prey on poor young children in Mali by falsely promising them good jobs and then trucking them to the Ivory Coast to do backbreaking, dangerous work on the cocoa plantations there.  These plantations produce over one third of all the cocoa used in the world.  As long as there is a demand for cocoa—as well as the need to keep its farming prices low, so the profit is kept by the manufacturers—there will be a need for cheap labor.  All over Asia, there are unscrupulous companies that employ local organized crime members to lure girls and young women who then are sold to prostitution rings and/or cheap labor pools internationally, including the U.S.  In October 2008, a wealthy perfume manufacturer on Long Island , NY , was convicted (along with his wife) of human trafficking and employee abuse.  They had secured two Indonesian women through one of these underground slavery companies that specialized in coercing unsuspecting teens into traveling overseas to work as domestic help.  Knowing that the women’s families had no idea what had happened to their daughters, the couple literally locked up the women they purchased in their mansion so that they couldn’t escape—only cook, clean, and raise the couple’s young children.  The few times the women tried to escape, they were beaten severely by the couple and tied up with ropes.  If not for a nosy neighbor and the couple’s children talking openly about how their nannies were living, the Indonesian women still would be slaves today.

Earlier today (11/4), at the UN headquarters in NY, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher opened their campaign and fund to support victims of slavery.  Moore and Kutcher became aware of the range of human trafficking that exists while visiting Cambodia two years ago.  There they met young girls (as young as five years old) who had been rescued from prostitution rings their parents unknowingly had handed them over to. Moore’s and Kutcher’s foundation will be raising money to support the medical, legal, and education aid that victims of human traffickers need in order to rebuild their lives.  They also aim to use social media outlets (Twitter, Facebook) to raise everyone’s awareness of human trafficking, especially when it involves the sex trade.