by Lisa McKay
Twenty five million is a number so large it defies comprehension. It’s more than the entire population of Australia. Who are they, and where?
They are Cambodian men trafficked to Thailand to work on construction projects. They are Yemeni children smuggled into Saudi Arabia to work as street beggars. They are children from Mali working on cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast.
To bring this slightly closer to home, the Ivory Coast holds forty-three percent of the world’s market in cocoa, and the USA is the world’s largest chocolate consumer.
To bring it closer still, the U.S. government estimates that about fifty-thousand women and children are trafficked into the United States every year for sweatshop labor, domestic servitude, or the sex trade.
…I pull up behind a shiny Corvette at the Millennium Biltmore and hand my keys to the valet. I am ashamed that after several recent stints in airport parking lots my car is filthy, and then proud that I do not own a Corvette. I’m ashamed, again, at the self-righteousness I recognize shadowing this thought. Then I am proud of my own humility.
I am only distracted from these mental gymnastics by the grandeur of the hotel lobby – acres of marble, ornate columns, and gilded ceilings…
The program that I am handed as I enter the event informs me that, for this evening at least, I am a 17-year-old girl named Panida from a hill tribe in Thailand. When I was twelve, my family sent me off with a man who visited my village and promised that if I came to work in his cigarette factory my earnings would be enough to support the rest of the family. He lied. I ended up in a brothel, where I worked for three years before I was rescued.
…I sip an apple martini. It is cold and sweet against my glossed lips – the bite of spirits cloaked by gentle green. A maraschino promise glows red from the bottom of the glass. I wonder whether Panida likes martinis. Then I remember she’s still too young to drink…
The walls of the ballroom are lined by carved pillars. An enormous chandelier hangs like an inverted wedding cake from the ceiling, four tiers of crystal falling toward the floor like a ballet of raindrops. At our table there doesn’t seem to be enough space for all the cutlery and accoutrements: two wine glasses, bread, individual pats of butter, our own personal dessert platters, and salads of braised pears and honeyed pecans.
Staff member from International Justice Mission mount the stage. They speak of modern-day slavery with a facility honed by years of witnessing what generally happens when power operates for too long in an accountability vacuum. Laws are just words on paper, the speakers say, until they are made reality in the lives of the vulnerable. And the vulnerable are just statistics until there are faces and stories to put to the violations.
Grainy black-and-white footage of brothel raids taken from hidden surveillance cameras is projected onto a large screen behind the stage. We see dozens of Panidas in seedy rooms, awaiting customers. A ragged toy perched neatly on a bed is a heartbreaking symbol of one little girl’s attempt to preserve some tattered remnant of a stolen childhood.
…Dessert taunts me all through dinner and in the end I don’t know which to start with. The small round of raspberry cheesecake, the brandy-snap basket filled with cream and strawberries, or the chocolate truffle? My carefully chosen black pants feel too tight…
It is too easy to simply showcase the irony of dining on steak and chicken while these videos play. Too easy to only raise an eyebrow at the fact that a mere twenty-one percent of my expensive ticket for the event actually went to the charity. But I am reminded of a familiar biblical admonition to look first to the log in my own eye. I am the one who owns so many clothes that I can spend half an hour deciding what to wear. I am the one with enough disposable income to afford the ticket in the first place. And I’m now the one responsible for how I respond to the information that’s being served to me on a silver platter right alongside three types of dessert.
The statement that catches me most off guard during the night is spoken near the end of the evening. It isn’t the shocking statistic that the trafficking of women and children for sex brings in more money annually than the entire Microsoft empire. It’s just six brave words.
“Hope chases us in this work.”
During the last eight years of my life – in prisons, in orphanages for abused children, in villages gutted by war and studded with landmines – I’d been granted glimpses into lives where cruelty, desperation, and grief had become normal. If you look too deep into the heart of that reality for too long, it is profoundly overwhelming. Over time it’s easy for cynicism to become a habit, even a refuge. It is tempting to rest in the numb embrace of a fatalistic paralysis.
…That night I dream of Rwanda, a place I haven’t yet been. After the benefit dinner I was up until one reading a book with the unforgettable title of Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures. I know better than to read this sort of stuff late at night. The tale is as raw as the title – three former U.N. workers detailing the savaging of their humanitarian ideals by successive missions to conflict zones. Their increasingly desperate disenchantment as the story unfolds is mesmerizing and excruciating, and the dreams this story grants me are black and white and full of mass graves and machetes…
Hope chases us.
Sometimes it seems that hope could do with a lengthy course of steroids. Perhaps then it might stand a fighting chance in the footrace with despair.
But on a good day I can be anchored by remembering the story of the good Samaritan. In the instant the Samaritan walked past the wounded man lying in the ditch, he was not being called to hire and train a police force to escort travelers, hunt down the brigands and see them bought to trial (complete with defense attorneys) or single-handedly transform the entire Jericho road into a bastion of safety. He is lauded because he stopped to help the one.
My namesake for the evening, Panida, had lived within the borders of Thailand her entire life, but because she came from a hill-tribe minority group, she had never been recognized as a citizen. Two years after she was rescued from the brothel she finally received a Thai passport and, with it, some legally defensible rights. Her smile as she was pictured holding up her passport spilled joy and hope into a ballroom eight thousand miles from where she lived – hope that it is worth trying to make a difference one life at a time.
I’ve been in California this past week, not the brothels of Thailand or the hills of Rwanda. Stopping for one wasn’t climbing into the ditch to haul out the wounded, rescuing a Panida, or picking up a scalpel. It was meeting a friend for breakfast, returning a phone call, and writing a check.
Cynicism is the wide path of least resistance, and hope never seems to find me when I’m on that track. But when I’m most often surprised by hope’s companionship is also not when I’m trotting full speed down the road to Jericho. It’s when, by my all-too-human standards, I’m not really making much progress at all.
It’s when I pause to see others’ love in action, helping liberate people from slavery and its usual breeding ground, poverty.
When I’ve stopped for beauty – flowers, music, mountains, sunsets, great stories, amazing food, and the peaceful hush of a summer evening.
And when I’ve stopped for one.
Mike, Papua New Guinea
“Hope chasing us,” Mike wrote to me the next day. “What a beautiful, precious image. Thanks for the reminder about guarding against cynicism.
“Why didn’t you publish that one? I really like how you didn’t cheapen it into the standard ‘I feel guilty because of all the ironies’ essay. I found the ending a bit abrupt, but I don’t know how I’d end it.”
Lisa, USA
“I haven’t put it on my website yet because I suspect I can sell it, but I haven’t gotten around to editing it again before I try.” I wrote back the next night.
“And I’m not sure about the ending, frankly. It’s interesting that you said it was abrupt. My main problem with it is that I’m not entirely sure I understand or mean what I’ve written in thos
e last couple of lines. I know they’re beautiful and all. But do I really feel hope when I’ve stopped for one? Or am I more often feeling impatient because my schedule’s been thrown off, or helpless because I’m not sure how to help that one, or simply feeling … nothing … because I’m looking too far forward and haven’t stopped to notice the moment?”
“I love the image of hope chasing us, love it. But putting into words what that actually means for me – that’s different. I think I partially succeeded in that essay, but only partially.”
Mike, Papua New Guinea
“Do you feel chased by hope?” Mike replied. “I don’t most times. But I think that sometimes hope sneaks up on us when we’re wallowing in a dark, dark place and bursts into the room holding a giant candle and says, ‘Surprise! You forgot about me. But I haven’t forgotten you!’
“I think I’m a fairly hopeful person, or at least an optimistic person. I even like to think of myself as a passionate person. I definitely used to be. Am I now? If I’m doing things that I (passionately) believe in, why am I so bloody tired half the time and so blah about life the other half? And does passion matter in comparison with, say, consistency?
“Passion. I think it’s a double-edged sword. I’m trying to learn to wield it without inflicting too much harm on others or myself. Add this to the rolodex of things we can chat about in person someday. Hopefully sooner rather than later.”
Lisa, USA
“Passion is another puzzle, isn’t it? I was driving home from work tonight and listening to Josh Groban’s O Holy Night on the radio. That’s probably my favorite Christmas song, and I think Groban’s got a good voice, but his rendition was all carefully controlled technical perfection. It came across completely devoid of passion and didn’t stir me in the slightest. How can you sing that song, with his talent, without throwing yourself heart and soul into it?
“But even as I point fingers at Groban I wonder about lack of passion in my own life. Maybe it’s just natural that a keen awareness of not living up to our own expectations in many areas, including living passionately, sharpens as we get older. But I remain puzzled as to how the deep passions that I know I am capable of and the immense gratitude that I feel for so many blessings in my life can sometimes co-exist with a gray fog that can descend so completely some days that my head and my heart don’t seem connected at all and I feel as if I’m wandering around wrapped in cotton wool.
“I wonder, even as I write this, whether hope or joy is connected more intimately with passion. What role does hope have in sustaining passion, or the other way around?
“It’s almost midnight here now. Travis came home just as I finished writing that last bit.
“Sigh.
“Have I told you about Travis? That when I came back from Turkey in August he believed he was starring in his own reality TV show?
“I thought it was a passing thing, but yesterday we actually got some time to hang out together for the first time in weeks and those delusions are all still there, probably even more firmly entrenched. Travis is convinced that he’s got the whole conspiracy figured out and it’s driving him crazy (no pun intended) that no one will admit to any of it.
“I’m so glad I’m going to San Diego tomorrow to spend Christmas with Erica and Leah and the gang. I’m not incredibly freaked out like I was the first time Travis dumped this story on me, but I know I can’t quite trust anything with regard to him at the moment. The whole situation breaks my heart. What would it be like to really believe that, to live under all that manufactured mental pressure? And how will he cope when this whole grand delusion that’s giving his life purpose and meaning at the moment (even as it’s putting him under incredible pressure) comes crashing down around him?
“It makes me feel helpless because I cannot see any way to reach him. And it makes me frustrated because I know I’m going to have to move out when I get back from Australia and the prospect of that is just exhausting. And, in the short term, it makes me incredibly unsettled when he’s around, because I’m never quite sure what he’ll do or say, or what mood he’s in, and I can feel the mental and emotional turmoil that he’s going through coming off him in waves.
“And yet, in the middle of all of this, there are glimpses of the flatmate I really enjoyed living with for the first year and a half.
“As I was yawning and making it clear I needed to go to bed tonight, he told me that he was journaling about all this and that he was going to write a book.
“‘You’d better write nice things about me. You’re going to make me famous,’ I joked, trying to finish the conversation on a light note.
“‘No,’ he said to me, laughing. ‘You’ll make yourself famous. I’ll just make you more famous.’
“It’s late, Mike, and I have a throbbing headache. I must close and try and go to sleep.”
Mike, Papua New Guinea
“It’s Christmas Eve, late afternoon, and I’m stuck in the office waiting for my staff to return from all their personal errands around town. I’m going to be the mean manager who locks the project vehicle up at my house over Christmas break so that staff don’t waste fuel donors intended for travel out to the projects on scuttling their friends around.
“Sorry to hear about what’s going on at home. You totally need to move out. You already know that, so my saying it is only affirmation. In the meantime I hope that San Diego and good friends have cured your headache. Probably safe mental space is doing wonders. I hope.
“I hope I’m able to make it to Australia next month.
“I hope I can get better at managing my emotions. I hope passion will remain a healthy force in my life that spurs love.
“That last is an up-and-down journey. Today is down. I learned yesterday that a raiding party looted and destroyed some buildings in one of the villages where we’re working. They also happened to destroy three of the precious seven toilets that my team has actually managed to get constructed there during the past three months. Ahh yes, just another day at work. These are the types of things that humanitarian organizations don’t mention in their glossy adverts.
“(For the love of God, why did they choose to destroy the toilets?)
“On days like these I must remind myself that this is just a down and that ups exist, too, so I’m sending along a piece called Jesus Wants You to Build a Toilet that I wrote earlier this week about a day recently that made me feel passionate, and purpose-filled, and hopeful.
“It’s well after the time I wanted to leave the office. The guys aren’t back with the vehicle yet, so I’m faced with the decision of whether to stay or go home and hope for the best. It’s Christmas Eve, though, and I’m leaning toward hope. And trust.
“Merry Christmas to you.”
Mike, Petats, Papua New Guinea
Jesus wants you to build a toilet
“Jesus wants you to build a toilet for the women,” I told Pastor Barry in my best broken Tok Pisin. Normally I feel a bit annoyed when people make Jesus the poster child for their personal cause. I remember, for example, the billboard in Atlanta a few years ago that showed a picture of a cherubic Jesus and said “Jesus was a vegetarian.” I laughed every time I saw it.
But Pastor Barry wore a baseball cap that sported the phrase “Jesus is my boss,” so I figured this might get his attention.
We were sitting on a bamboo bench on Petats Island, in Papua New Guinea. A refreshing sea breeze rustled the coconut palms and mango trees. The bright red hibiscus flowers danced in the wind. It was a beautiful Pacific morning – a perfect day for conducting an evaluation of the water and sanitation project we were implementing in the region.
I had just inspected one of the new ventilated improved pit toilets built near the church. It’s a really well-constructed toilet. And Pastor Barry keeps a lock on it. The women told me it’s only used on Sundays or special occasions. Apparently Pastor Barry doesn’t want people to use it regularly. So most of the time people go in the bush or walk into the sea, but sometimes
they get to use the nice new toilet.
I asked the women whether they liked it. They giggled, perhaps on account of my broken Tok Pisin, and perhaps because they were embarrassed that a white man with notebook, camera and funny GPS unit strung around his neck was asking them whether they like defecating in the lone toilet. After the initial embarrassment, the eyes of one of the women lit up. “Yes,” she told me. “We feel safe with the toilet.”
The United Nations has proclaimed this year the International Year of Sanitation. That may seem irrelevant for those of us who are able to flush and forget, but roughly a third of the people on the planet don’t have access to improved sanitation. That more or less means two billion people relieve themselves in the bush.
Lack of improved sanitation has all sorts of negative effects on public health. Like dead children – diarrhea is still the leading cause of death for children under five. Like the additional burden for mothers who regularly have to take care of sick children. Like cholera outbreaks – ever hear of cholera occurring in a place with improved sanitation? Nope.
Sanitation is a basic human need. If you look at the data from New York, London, and Paris from the days before those cities had built sewers, you’ll see that their mortality rates were about the same as mortality rates today in sub-Saharan Africa. Everybody poos. And in many places around the world, still, everybody poos on the open ground.
I’ve spent much of my time overseas focusing on improving access to clean water and sanitation. Women in displacement camps in northern Uganda, for example, would often wait in line for two hours to pump water, while about 1,500 schoolchildren would have to share two toilets. So we drilled more wells and built more toilets. In Sri Lanka, after the tsunami destroyed thousands of houses, we installed hundreds of wells and built hundreds of toilets in addition to rebuilding schools, health clinics, and homes.
In Papua New Guinea I’ve begun focusing more on improving hygiene practices than building infrastructure. We can build lots of toilets, but what if people don’t actually use them? (Happens more often than you may think.) And if people don’t wash their hands after using the toilet, it’s likely there will be hardly any improvements in health.