Tonight, a few of us watched the movie “Human Trafficking”. It’s a 3-hour, 2-part movie that depicts intense realities of the buying and selling of humans all over the world.
The trafficking of human beings is happening right now.
This very second.
Not just in some obscure foreign country, but in America. Maybe right down the street from my house.
I found myself minutes later outside on the balcony of our house in Cambodia, my eyes blurred with tears, torn by the images and sounds that were lazored into my mind… the faces, the countries, the way they are abducted, the hell they are put through… these children bought or stolen from their homes and forced to turn tricks with men, working 12 hours a day or more… these young girls who are manipulated into thinking that they are going to have modeling careers and are instead packed in a truck and shipped in groups to brothels.
Until this year, I didn’t even know this was going on.
I’d heard of ‘human trafficking’ when one of my college professors mentioned it, and I saw a brief special on it on Dateline once, but until I got to Thailand and Cambodia, I had no idea that it was like THIS.
And now that I know, I can’t go back to not knowing. I can’t pretend like its not happening. I can’t have mere coffee table conversation about it, and then move on to the next subject of politics and the weather. I can’t find a place of reconciliation in living comfortably at home while over 
18,000 children, both boys and girls, and young women are kidnapped and swept away with force from their families and homes, coerced to be sex slaves for hundreds of men over the course of their young lifetime… and then just thank God for my American given freedom.
I can’t find a place of peace in thinking that I’ll just let other people deal with it, or some other kind of cliché that says “its just not my calling in life”. I am not satisfied with excuses or every reason in the world why WE can’t be the generation to actually DO something about it.
I couldn’t hold it in. A geyser was welling from my core, and I yelled out at the top of my lungs over the city in a voice that I barely recognized as my own. I haven’t yelled like that ever in my life.
“FREEDOM!!!!!!!!!!” And sobbing… and it welled up in me again.
“FREEDOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” It was almost blood curdling.
“FREEDOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” I lowered myself to my knees and could only speak “Jesus” now, my forehead to the ground and the tears flowing upside down into my hair.
And in my spirit I cried out, “Oh God, forgive us… our apathy is disgusting to you. Our complacency once we’re brought out of ignorance still lingers, and we wade in it like we would a pool of human waste. Oh God, forgive ME. Forgive me for my selfishness. For my self-centeredness, my attitude of trying to fit your will into my life…”
“Kim, daughter, you ARE my will. Be the change you want to see in the world.”
This issue is HUGE. And far too unknown. It is going on every minute of every day. Children exposed to this filth are crying every day. They are injected with all kinds of sexually transmitted diseases. Women who’ve been stolen from all over the globe are threatened and paralyzed to escape or do anything about it. They are trapped.
They are enslaved. Used, re-used. Used. Re-used.
Right now, I don’t know where to start. The truth is, all of this goes on underground in a network of ‘business men’, behind locked and barred doors.
I don’t know where those doors are. I don’t know where the entrance to the underground is.
I’m overwhelmed.
I‘m coming alive this year, but being alive HURTS. I can’t walk off this Race talking primarily about my journey of self-discovery. That journey was jump-started and I’ll always be learning and changing, so I’m so, so thankful. It’s just doesn’t make much sense to focus on who I’ve become this year when 18,000 people this year will not have that chance. They are, instead, what they are told to be: property. Worthless property.
So while I’m thankful for all the personal lessons I’ve learned, I’m driven by an urgency to tell everyone I know that this IS A REALITY of the world we are living in right now.
When I see the men walking with the young boys and girls, I just want to grab the little ones and run. Lets be honest, many of the unsolved mystery cases in America have their unending end here. Kidnapped children whose bodies are never found aren’t dead; they’ve been trafficked. We wonder where they’ve gone? Hidden and deported to an underground brothel somewhere in the world. Maybe somewhere in the United States.
