This month ministry lands me in Kothe, Nepal. It is a beautiful village that is colored with forests, rivers and delightful people. Here our contact lives by a delightful river, has banana trees growing in the back yard and is just minutes away from a breathtaking waterfall that we can play in. Our chef is “mom” (the pastor’s wife) and she is a great cook. Aside from our accommodations, our ministry is working with an anti-human trafficking campaign that the church is associated with.
The basic idea of the program is to go into mountain villages, set up shop at someone’s house and invite as many people as we can to listen to our presentation on what human trafficking is. Having never had worked with anti-human trafficking, it was intimidating to write a presentation about it, but thankfully Google could help us out. Our team decided to research statistics on the issue and we were surprised to find that Nepal was a hub for traffickers. Did you know that 50% of traffickers know the victim and 22% of the traffickers are family members! Also, girls between the ages of 13-18 are at the highest risk of being trafficked. As many of us would assume, trafficking is only a big issue in large cities like Kathmandu. Actually, that is not the case, the traffickers seek out beautiful girls in the mountain villages and lie to their families promising them good jobs and education in the big city. Since the people living in the mountains are very poor, most cannot provide good education or can afford to pass an offer like that up. The families see something called opportunity for their daughters and like any parent, only want the best for their children so they jump at it. Unlike in America, these people have no idea of what scammers are and allow their daughters to go “to the big city” and never hear from them again.
Our mission is to damask the evil plans of the traffickers and educate village people on how to protect their families. Our program consists of two speakers sharing about what trafficking is, we share statistics and also share bible verses that counter the statistics and finally we show a movie depicting what trafficking might look like. Getting to the villages is not an easy task and we walk as far as two hours up a mountain just to get to there! Although it is a physical challenge, we know our work is for someone much greater and He gives us the strength to push on. Educating the village people about human trafficking has been rewarding. Knowledge is power, and this month we were able to empower many families!
