by John Curtis
We learned that, as well as the sex trade, kids are also sold into a form of indentured household slavery. Under a system known as kumlari, poor families will sell a child to a wealthy Indian, who employs the child as a domestic worker. The story fed to the families is that the employer will also care for the child and pay for their education, but this rarely happens. Instead, the kids are worked eighteen hours a day and sometimes physically and sexually abused. A child can be sold for as little as fifty US dollars and there are actual markets held in Nepal where wealthy Indians travel to buy a new servant.
Bizarrely, there is also a trade in the use of kids in circuses in India, a problem that's become worse since the Indian government banned the use of animals under the big top. It seems that it was cruel to exploit animals in circuses, but the same rule didn't apply to underage kids. There are stories of child performers – acrobats and the like – being physically and sexually abused during training, of kids having melted wax dripped into open sores caused by too much time on the trapeze, and of motorbike engines being revved to cover the sound of children's screams from the beatings they receive.
In India, trafficking is also carried out under the auspices of religion. Children known as devadasis are ‘married’ to a Hindu god and kept in a temple, but the reality is that the girls become playthings of the temple priests or the local business elite.
Despite my vow not to work under the umbrella of other NGOs again, it did seem that the best way for us to get the lay of the land in Nepal and India was to meet with some experienced local operators and, by way of easing our way in, perhaps offer some financial support to in-situ programs. We met with some people from Sathi-India, an organisation which gets kids off the streets around train stations, where many hang out and are preyed upon; and Every-child, a British charity which repatriates Nepalese kids back from India and especially targets the devadasis. Finally, we decided to partner with the Esther Benjamins (EB) Trust. I met with their no-nonsense boss, Philip Holmes, who was a former British Army Colonel, and we hit it off. I liked his style and felt we could work together. They have rescued hundreds of kids from the circuses and their facilities for the kids are excellent. We are working on an MOU with the Nepalese government and have had tea with their ambassador in Australia.
I loved Nepal, and the Nepalese people were fantastic. It was nice for me to travel somewhere other than south-east Asia for a change, and I found the authorities quite open to us, and interested in learning more about our covert operations, training and equipment. Misao and I met with the second-highest-ranking policeman in Kathmandu, as his boss was away, and he welcomed our involvement in the country. We also met with an expert on child trafficking who told us that part of the problem with policing underage prostitution in Nepal and India was that it was fairly common for retired police officers to be offered a financial stake in brothels, and for them to organise and oversee protection. It was explained to us that Nepal was a small country and even if underage girls were rescued from a brothel the pimps and older working girls usually knew in which shelter to find them. Many kids, the expert said, had been saved but then put under intense pressure to return to work.
The Grey Man went into India in early 2011 to support an operation by the Esther Benjamin's Trust to rescue Nepalese girls who were being trafficked as domestics into Saudi Arabia. Luckily, an Australian corporation had donated a couple of airline tickets for our people who were there to provide expertise and act as bodyguards to the Nepalese team from EB Trust. The actions of the traffickers were illegal in Nepal but not India, so we couldn't get the support of the Indian authorities and had to let it go. The cost of doing operations in Mumbai was prohibitive as well. We sent a three-person team into Nepal to see what we could do there, with one volunteer slotted to stay for five months to gather intelligence. They were later joined by a Grey Man intelligence operative.
By March 2011 we had four Grey Man personnel in India and Nepal and conducted our first successful operation on the Indian subcontinent with our partner agency, the EB Trust. We were supported by FSI Worldwide, an international security firm and ethical labour force recruitment agency that uses former Ghurka soldiers in many roles. The result was the arrest of a circus owner who was a major trafficker of young children. Nepalese police had been searching for this man for four years. In this operation The Grey Man provided an intelligence operative to assist the local team and he was withdrawn just prior to the arrest.
The Trust had fifteen signed statements from girls who the man had trafficked in the past. After the circus was raided, in Rajasthan, two girls who had been reported as missing in Nepal were found. Our worry was that the circus owner might be released after forty-eight hours if serious charges could not be laid. Our people and the EB Trust's people worked frantically behind the scenes, calling in favours in India and Nepal to ensure a prosecution eventuated. To clinch it, a human rights lawyer was brought in and the EB Trust ended up transporting the families of girls who had previously been trafficked by the man to Rajasthan so they could testify. In the end, the man was charged with kidnapping and will hopefully do gaol time in India and, if extradition can be organised, in Nepal as well. This was a good start to our work in India and we hope to have more arrests and rescues there in the future.
We had been relying on our volunteers bringing their own skills to the table and then giving some training to them on the job, but over time I realised this wasn't good enough. We decided we needed to run formal inductions for all potential Grey Man operatives, so I brought in a guy named Graham Brammer to give us some advice on training. Graham was a friend and former Australian SAS officer who had served in Vietnam. Another friend, Sam, a former Royal Marine Commando, and two senior former-AFP people contributed ideas to the mix and we started putting together a Grey Man induction course.
In order to ensure our operatives are able to take care of themselves in tricky situations, we decided to offer self-defence training. Fortunately a Melbourne-based close personal protection company called ‘538’ which trains bodyguards offered to deliver this part of the course for free. We also needed to bump up the intelligence side of our work and I enlisted Simon, a former British Special Forces warrant officer to run the induction courses and set up a dedicated Grey Man intelligence cell. Simon had served in undercover roles for nineteen years and had already done some work for us as a volunteer. He was an interesting guy and had written a book that applied Special Forces principles to life in general.
We've also had several more women join our ranks. Nisha, a young mum, came on board to handle various functions from fund-raising to public relations and did a great job for us. Lara, a former army captain, volunteered for the intelligence role in one of our target countries and I also set up a separate administration function for our rescue arm and put Laurel, an expat Briton and mother of two, in charge of it. As well as individual people making donations and giving up their time, we have also had support from companies. Russell contacted the large Australian law firm Clayton Utz to see if they would be interested in supporting Grey Man in some way and the firm promptly decided to provide pro-bono advice for us. It was an offer we have greatly appreciated, as was the offer by Accru Rawsons to do our charity audit each year.
There are very few perks in being the president of The Grey Man, but one turned up in January 2010. Lieutenant Commander Shane Doolin, the captain of an Australian Navy patrol boat, the HMAS Glenelg, and his crew of AWARE 2 (a rotating crew system for our patrol boats), had come on board a year or so earlier as active supporters of our charity.
The crew had raised around $8000 for us in that time. To further boost their already impressive fundraising efforts, Shane offered us the chance of auctioning off a cruise for two on board his ship on a three-day journey to the rugged Coburg Peninsula, north of Darwin. The perk for me was that he invited Misao and me along as his guests. The Grey Man held a fundraiser in November with the Attorney-General of Queensland as the guest speaker and two lovel
y girls, Kim and Ally, put in the highest bid ($3000), so, in January, all four of us arrived in Darwin and joined the ship. The crew was great, the food excellent, and we were impressed with the outstanding work our navy people do, without enough recognition I think.
Although The Grey Man is a rescue organisation and our focus is children, I sometimes think that we are really there more for inspiration for what is possible. I received an email one day from a school teacher called Bill who knew of some Thai girls who had been trafficked to South Africa and he wanted to get advice and/or help to get them out. I advised against it, as we didn't have the resources to go into Africa. I did say if he did anything himself to involve the relevant embassies and we passed on some contacts. About a month later, Bill called to tell me that not only had he got the girls out but that he had also contacted the Office of Home Affairs in South Africa and had been instrumental in closing down a trafficking ring. Although I don't recommend something like this as a standard course of action, it goes to show that individuals can do amazing things.
I know I've been critical of some other NGOs in telling my story, but I do want to place on the record here that The Grey Man has been fortunate enough to work with a number of good people as well. Organisations in Thailand such as Kids Ark, Childlife, New Life Center and Buddies Along the Roadside, Childlife, and COSA have been fantastic, as have the Sao Sary Foundation, and Geraldine Cox's Sunrise Children's Villages in Cambodia and the Esther Benjamin's Trust in Nepal. To be fair to IJM, they do great work in Africa and India rescuing people from dispossession and labour trafficking.
Sompop once said of The Grey Man: ‘They are like monks, with the hearts of police’. I love that description, and the work we've done over the years, but there have been times since Cambodia, just as there were over the years before then, when I wanted to be done with The Grey Man, and hand over the work to someone else.
Twenty-five years ago I went to a workshop with Robert Kiyosaki, a successful businessman and author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. During the session he asked three questions: what would you do if you inherited fifteen million dollars and weren't allowed to work again; what would you do if you found you had only six months to live; and finally, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?
It is a series of questions we should all ask ourselves. The key driver in my life from when I was very young was finding my purpose in life and I found that in rescuing children. That would be my answer to all three of Kiyosaki's questions: that I would do what I've done (though the fifteen million might have made the job easier). I felt a weight lifted from my shoulders when I found my purpose, but there was still something missing.
I had a dream recently that I was in a large American automobile sitting in the car park of a museum and there was something creepy in the darkness. I was afraid of whatever was in the basement and tried to drive the car up the levels of the car park exit ramp. The car, however, was too wide and it was scraping the concrete walls as I drove up the spiral. The wheels were spinning and losing traction and started sliding back down. I think the car was my own ego trying to push its way through life and the darkness was my fear of losing my ego as I immersed myself more and more in the spiritual side of life. We don't realise that although our egos help us achieve things, they can only get us so far and don't ultimately assist with our happiness.
The dream made me wonder how much of my altruism is about self-interest. I wanted to do something that made my life worthwhile and meaningful before I died. I think minimising suffering is a worthy cause but I also did it for myself.
I realised at the age of fifty-two that my future lay in returning to the spiritual journey I had started in my teen years. I had found purpose, and that was a great thing, but I came to the realisation that The Grey Man was just an expression of my life's purpose, not the purpose itself. The Grey Man spoke to that part of people that wanted to make a difference in the world before they left it and maybe we inspired some people to work towards their own purpose in life. I liked that part of my life, but the next phase of my life, though hazy, is to go inward and touch the core of what we truly are beneath the façade of the human ego. That is the missing ingredient. Buddhists believe we are all basically pure beings but we cover that essential nature with the cloak of ego and that is where our problems begin.
Seven years ago I was prepared to die because the world had not answered my need for purpose. It was arrogant of me to expect it to. Over the years with The Grey Man I have become a different person to the selfish, small-minded ego that I was. I have found it is not at the final destination where happiness lies, but in the journey. More importantly, it's the journey you take for others that brings happiness.
As soon as I stopped trying to achieve for me and started trying to achieve my goals for the benefit of others, my life became better. If there have been any lessons I learned in this life, I think that one is perhaps the biggest, and also that our purpose is not necessarily written in stone by the hand of God. It is something we can choose.
I love Misao, but even now she finds it difficult to be with me – justifiably so – because I still devote too much of my time to the organisation. I wonder if setting up The Grey Man and rescuing those first five kids was a bit like earning my green beret in the commandos. The journey towards achieving a goal is often more exciting, fun and fulfilling than arriving at the destination. I felt that the award of my green beret was an anticlimax, and to a large extent the work we do at The Grey Man is similarly anticlimactic. There are no orchestras playing, no children crying with happiness at their newfound freedom, and few truly uplifting moments. So many of our operations become more difficult than they have to be due to lack of commitment on the part of local police, or bureaucratic red tape, or crossed wires and turf wars between NGOs.
Having said that, after many false starts I think I have found my purpose in life. It does not always make me happy, but every day now I wake up with gratitude for this life and I can die knowing I fulfilled a promise to my daughter, and that maybe I've helped some other children get a second shot at happiness.
I suppose it's the scale of the problem that keeps me going, and that is not uplifting at all. Just when I think that we have made a small difference to some children, I learn something new about the extent and depravity of the child-trafficking trade that nearly crushes my will to go on. Then, when I'm just about to chuck it all in, I think of the kids we're putting through school in the hill tribe villages, of my friend Sila who wants to free his people from exploitation, of the many great people in Australia and overseas who are so dedicated to our organisation, and of Misao who has stood by me for better for worse, and I know I can't just walk away.
After I'd rescued the first few kids, and before I set up The Grey Man, I felt great for a while. For the first time in my life I felt fulfilled, and that I had a real purpose here on earth, but I don't feel that way anymore. The endless administration, the politics and dealing with people wear me down and chip away at my soul. That, I suppose, is the price I must pay for setting aside the second half of my life to do something for other people.
Managing a charity is not my forte – I'm the first to admit it – but I've invested so much time in this thing that it has become part of me. However, I was happiest, if that is the right word, when I was working solo, in the field rescuing kids. I long to go back to those days, of being in the shadows – of being the Grey Man.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are many people I'd like to thank, starting with my mother. Thanks for my education even though it was a struggle for you. If there is any nobility in me, it came from you. Thank you, also, to Minnie, the best grandmother of all.
My beautiful wife, Misao, didn't understand what it was I was into at the start of our relationship, but once she did, she became my greatest supporter. I'd like to thank her for sharing my journey when very few would have. It hasn't been easy for her, I know, but she is the best. My gorgeous daughter is the reason I started this jo
urney and I thank her for calling me her hero. I can die happy.
I had previously considered writing a book about The Grey Man but the demands on my time were so great I thought it would never happen. Luckily, Tony Park approached me and although others had asked to write a book about us, Tony had a military background and I liked his style. I also liked his adventure novels, so the choice was easy. He inspired me in that he had chased his dreams and was achieving them so I consider him a role model as well. Thanks Tony.
I'd like to thank the people at my publishers, Pan Macmillan, for their kindness and help to a newcomer. Thanks especially to deputy publishing director Tom Gilliatt, senior editor Emma Rafferty, copy editor Clara Finlay, and publicist Louise Cornegé. Thanks, too, to my agent Isobel Dixon from the Blake Friedmann literary agency for all her hard work.
If I was the one to start the ball rolling with The Grey Man then the only reason it is still rolling is because of Russell Hawksford. Adventurer, business consultant and friend, Russell appeared at just the right time and co-founded The Grey Man organisation with me. We have been through a lot together and thanks to Russell I have managed to keep my sense of humour and not kill anyone . . . yet. Without him there would be no Grey Man because he took on the tasks that I couldn't handle or that would have driven me to distraction. I hope you are as proud of what we created together as I am, in spite of the impact on our lives.
Geoff McGlashan was also there at the start and through his efforts The Grey Man now has chapters in seven cities in Australia. For your sense of humour and dedication, thank you
Thanks to Tony, our Director of Operations, for, as he puts it, ‘making me look good’ and for his enlightening conversations and sense of humour about life, the universe and everything while trolling the world's dark places. I'd like to assure Tony there are still crapholes I haven't taken him to yet.