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After living in the shelter for as long as we were allowed, my mother and I are now living together and trying to support ourselves. j a Mes ko f i a nnan
Origin: Ghana
Trafficked in/to: Ghana
Form of enslavement: Forced child labor Current status: Free, founder of the nonprofit organization Challenging Heights Source: James Kofi Annan’s written personal narrative, “Child Trafficking: The Experience of James Kofi Annan”; reproduced with permission. Context: James Kofi Annan volunteered to write the story of his life specifically for inclusion in this volume. He is currently in the process of writing a book-length narrative of his experience. His work has been celebrated by organizations and universities around the world.
I’m giving you a very small detail of what it means to be a victim of child trafficking in fishing in Ghana. My aim in sharing this experience in this book is to assist you to make that decision—to resolve to assist in the repair of shattered lives. One of my greatest challenges is getting people to gain insight into what it means, practically, to be a victim of trafficking. No matter how crafty and skillful a writer or an artist may be, nothing on paper can parallel the experience for its length, intensity, and emotions. I no longer call myself a victim. I’m a survivor because I have overcome the shackles of impunity, of bondage, and of slavery. I’m now a free person independently living my life. But because of my great insights into what it means to be working under oppression, I am unable to rest—my soul is constantly agitated and troubled to do something, and that explains why after years of lucrative employment I still cannot boast of any personal material benefit I can truly call my own. I continue to trouble my personal sustainability and sometimes look practically ridiculous before people when it comes to light that after five years of such a lucrative employment, rising to become a manager in no less a bank than Barclays Bank, I’m unable to afford to change my 1994 Nissan Primera [for a newer car]! Well, the truth is that I can afford it, but it gives me no pleasure when I know that that [a] little nine-year-old girl, Esi, is currently being raped in that sunny afternoon in that rugged stone hot savanna bush, and this rapist glees with satisfaction that his continuous desecration of this little girl is what will give him strength for his work! And this heartless man leaves this
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little girl grimacing in the bush, staggering in pain, and yet her parents are oblivious to what their children go through. Having this little knowledge, of what patience should I have to try and rescue Esi? So all I have I continuously sink into the repair of lives, assisting victims to regain hope for life, and engaging in [a] rescue effort to prevent other children from becoming victims. This explains my passion and unrestrained quest to fight child slavery in Ghana. In fact, as I assist other children out of slavery, it becomes a personal healing for myself, too, because all that I saw happen to others and all that happened to me are both reasons to be personally traumatized. I believe I can repair my life if I continue to assist in the repair of other children’s lives—a healing balm for myself ! I was initially trafficked from Winneba (my hometown) to Yeji at the age of six. According to sources, I was initially sold for two years for $10. This earned me the ordeal of working in about twenty fishing communities along the Volta Lake, between Yeji and Buipe, which are about eight hours’ drive apart. Children trafficked to these areas are aged between four and fifteen years. These children are engaged in fishing day and night in the longest river in Ghana and the largest man-made lake in the world, Lake Volta. Shelter was usually made of mud, sticks, stones, and thatch, usually located close to the river and the bush. This made our shelters fertile grounds for the breeding of mosquitoes, snakes, scorpions, frogs, worms, and other wild animals. There had been a number of occasions when poisonous snakes and scorpions had lived and lurked in places where I slept. Snake bites and malaria were common, and because of the absence of medical care, a lot of children died as a result. The river served a multipurpose of being my destination for fishing, my source of drinking water, bathing (directly in it), defecating, all in competition with such animals as cattle and pigs. The river breeds a special kind of worm which lays special kinds of eggs which infect children with bilharzia (schistosomiasis). This disease can be more painful than gonorrhea. Especially when the disease intensity nears a quarter of one’s urine coming out as blood, then the blood urine will start clotting, and the affected child will need a louder shout, a harder hit on [the] abdomen, and a tighter squeeze on the genitals before you can pass a small amount of urine. Bilharzia affects nearly every male and about 50 percent of all female fishing-trafficking victims. I do not remember when exactly I contracted that disease, but what
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I know is that I never lived without that disease until somewhere in 2003. I was still carrying this disease even while I was in the university, and I got healed of it only about six years ago, sixteen years after my escape! I worked at several villages along the river, applying different methods of fishing, which demanded high degrees of physical strength and precision. My typical working day started at 3:00 a.m. and ended at 8:00 p.m. from Sunday to Sunday (seven days in the week), with hardly any days off. Children regularly worked without closing for days. In this case, we rested in the canoes on the river, and food would be brought to us via neighboring canoes, and in this case there will be no shelter, and we will be at the mercy of the changing weather (hot and cold) day and night. My typical day’s duties included carting the outboard motors, paddling the canoe, casting the nets, dragging and pulling the net, diving to remove trapped nets (typically about fifteen to twenty yards deep, depending on the location of the day), mending nets, shadowing fishes, removing fishes from nets, fetching firewood from the bush, etc. Diving is one such dangerous activity undertaken by child slaves. No one taught new entrants how to swim or dive. It is one of the activities which comes as a result of our quest for survival. The older people will throw us into the lake at unexpected times and locations, and you are expected to survive. You will be allowed to gulp water, choke, lose breath before they realize that you are finally drowning; then they will rescue you. This exercise is meant to signal to you that you would need to know how to swim and dive if you wish to survive. If you don’t, the next time you are abruptly thrown into the lake, no one will care about the quantities of water you gulp. These simple exercises ended the lives of many children. Diving is a common activity for all male children. Due to the [tree] stumps left in the wake of the flooding of the lake, cast nets are often trapped. But because the net is more expensive than we the children, instead of pulling the net, which could result in damages to it, we were required to dive into the lake to disentangle them—ages did not really matter. Often due to some technical reasons, children are trapped under the lake by the nets, and some of them die. I saw children die under trapped nets. On several occasions, children died without their remains being recovered from the river after having been trapped by nets. I remember my personal trauma of having been trapped under the river and miraculously finding myself on shore with blood oozing out of my nose, mouth, anus, ears, and skin pores.
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Suffering physical and sexual abuse was an accepted part of children’s daily work. Whether in the high rivers or at home, older people could hit children with anything in sight: sticks, paddles, clubs, thorny fishes, rope, slaps, blows, etc. The girls are useful for three typical reasons: as fishmongers, as cooks, and as sex materials. I saw children as young as eight years old being sexually abused, sometimes even in the course of work! It was normal, for instance, for a girl to be raped and get impregnated by older men. [There were] no protection and no law enforcement because of the remoteness and inaccessible nature of the locations. Typically, children here are either under debt or contracted bondage. They will have to serve a number of years. At the expiration of their bonded periods, their masters will go back to their parents to renegotiate for an extension of the bond. If you are lucky, your master would go with you when he is going to renew the contract on you. This makes the children lack the ability to speak about anything that concerns them. They are given scanty food, no medical care, no school, no freedom and have insufficient rest. Their slavery conditions are worsened by the fact that their working locations are not easily accessible to provide opportunities for escape. As children, we had no rights, no dignity, and no protection. We had only one, but very “important” aspiration: to grow into adulthood so that we could also abuse other children! The cumulative effects of all these were psychological nightmares, flashes, aggression, and intermittent panics that I went through after my escape. Due to the diminishing in the stock of fish in the river, there emerged a concept of multiple trafficking, where children were initially trafficked by a particular person, then retrafficked to another person unknown to the original source. This sometimes can go on for a number of times and a number of years, thereby making the tracing of some children quite difficult. After twenty-one years of uninterrupted freedom, and with all my education, I still shy away psychologically from remembering some of the traumatic experiences of child slavery and child labor—the abuse, the pain, and the impoverishment. This explains my passion toward helping other children out of slavery. I have been there before, and after a good education I know that something urgent needs to be done to help these children recover their lives and hope for a better future. There are still many children in the same
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situation, suffering similar abuses and enduring the same conditions, and I stand privileged to do something for them. In my case, no one rescued me. I rescued myself ! It had been back and forth, with a lot of battles between my parents, but after several attempts I finally succeeded in escaping from the pain of modern slavery, leaving behind several other children—boys and girls—anguishingly working for the economic gains of older persons. Briefly, how did I perform so creditably in school, to the extent that I set an unbroken academic record? After I escaped, I enrolled myself into two schools: classroom education and poverty! I faced the challenge of combining looking for food to eat and looking for knowledge for my future. I am grateful that in the end I could do both: I fished and farmed to pay my way into school from basic to the university. Enrolling in school in class six at age thirteen without even knowing the alphabet was another trying moment. I had to humble myself to learn the alphabet and the numerals and how to spell my own name, from kindergarten and class one, in order to build on. Overall, I came last in our first-term test out of nine children. In the second term, I came seventh out of fifteen children. In the third term, I came sixth in the class of twenty students. This qualified me for a promotion to Junior Secondary School One. In Junior Secondary School One, I came in seventh out of twenty-five students for the first and second terms, and in the third term I came in first! I topped the class, simple! Since then I came in first in all areas until I sat for my final examinations. When the results were released for the final basic schools certificate, I did not only top the school but set a performance record which is still unbroken (1991–2009). You see the talent that was to have been wasted? You and I can never tell how many more of such talents are being wasted under the greedy economic eyes of traffickers, ably assisted by lack of law enforcement! I then entered Winneba Secondary School and became one of very few students to qualify for the university. I gained admission to the University of Ghana in 1996 and graduated in 2000. I gained employment with the Barclays Bank of Ghana. Life kept changing with each passing day after my escape, but it took determination, endurance, hard work, dedication, and humility of heart to get me this far. Though it was CHALLENGING, I am getting to my HEIGHTS steadily. This is the origin of CHALLENGING HEIGHTS:
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that no matter the challenges children go through (enslavement, poverty, diseases, etc.), they can get to any height of their choice. I began my career in 1994 as an account clerk with Ekem Art Pottery, a local manufacturing company in Winneba. This was to enable me to mobilize funds for my college education. In 1996, I left the firm to pursue a university degree, which I completed in 2000. While in the university I took to farming and fishing. After my mandatory national service with the government of Ghana, I continued my career, this time as a banker with Barclays Bank of Ghana, where I worked until I resigned in 2007 to pursue my master’s degree and to devote more attention to my passion—Challenging Heights. It was from these career paths—fishing, farming, field laborer, accounts clerk, and banker—that I have been financing Challenging Heights. I started my community projects in 1994, immediately after high school, when I formed Sankor Youth Association to start my community campaign for the rights of children. Sankor Youth Association was transformed into Challenging Heights in 2003 to reflect a wider platform for children. I use Challenging Heights as a platform to assist parents who demand the return of their children from slavery in fishing, domestic servitude, and commercial sexual exploitation. We rescue children and provide a program of recovery, help parents improve their income and ensure school attendance of returned children, and enable fishing communities and home communities to reject the sale and exploitation of children. I also help empower children through classroom education, children’s rights training, and advocacy. be at r i c e fe rnand o
Origin: Sri Lanka
Trafficked in/to: Lebanon
Form of enslavement: Forced domestic labor Current status: Free, founder of Nivasa Foundation Source: Interviewed by Mindy Todd on the program “Modern-Day Slavery,” The Point, WGBH, NPR, Boston, July 2, 2007. Context: Beatrice Fernando is a popular public speaker who works to prevent the false recruitment of domestic workers in her native Sri Lanka through her organization Nivasa Foundation (www.nivasafoundation.org). This interview with radio host Mindy Todd was recorded in WGBH studios in Boston for the show The Point. Fernando is also author of a full-length book about her escape from slavery, In Contempt of Fate: The Tale of a Sri Lankan Sold Into Servitude Who Survived to Tell It (Merrimac, Mass.: Bearo, 2004).